--- title: New Google Doodle Honors Lunar New Year description: A new Google Doodle is ringing in the Lunar New Year (in Chinese astrology the Year of the Goat) with an animated graphic. canonical: https://time.com/3714524/chinese-new-year-goat-sheep-ram/ author: Kevin McSpadden article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-02-19T03:49:36.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:48:36.035Z og:title: New Google Doodle Honors Chinese New Year og:description: Gong xi fa cai! og:url: https://time.com/3714524/chinese-new-year-goat-sheep-ram/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltccc81cbf97d29198/69877feda988caa9556ac8a2/chinese-new-year-sheep-goat.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 4584 og:image:height: 2579 og:image:alt: A performer looks out from the head of a lion dance costume during the opening of Ditan Temple Fair on the Lunar New Year's Eve in Beijing, China Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2015 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: New Google Doodle Honors Chinese New Year twitter:description: Gong xi fa cai! twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltccc81cbf97d29198/69877feda988caa9556ac8a2/chinese-new-year-sheep-goat.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # New Google Doodle Honors Chinese New Year > Sponsored content. 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Every edition is assembled by TIME editors rather than generated automatically. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-brief-2026q3/newsletters?i=cfa8adbe-66a5-4940-9d75-3d05577b26e9&cr=time-nl-brief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Kevin McSpadden](https://time.com/author/kevin-mcspadden/) ## Kevin McSpadden Feb 19, 2015 3:49 AM UTC  A performer looks out from the head of a lion dance costume during the opening of Ditan Temple Fair on the Lunar New Year's Eve in Beijing, China Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2015 A performer looks out from the head of a lion dance costume during the opening of Ditan Temple Fair on the Lunar New Year's Eve in Beijing, China Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2015 Andy Wong—AP by [Kevin McSpadden](https://time.com/author/kevin-mcspadden/) ## Kevin McSpadden Feb 19, 2015 3:49 AM UTC A new [Google Doodle](http://www.google.com/doodles/lunar-new-year-2015) is ringing in the Lunar New Year — in Chinese astrology, the Year of the Goat — with an animated graphic that looks more like a sheep. Or it could be a ram. But the confusion is understandable, since the Chinese word (羊) for all three animals is the same. For people across East Asia, this is an important time for family reunions. In China, what is often called [the largest annual human migration ](http://time.com/3712347/chinese-new-year-travel/)on earth takes place as millions of migrant workers leave the cities and board trains to return to their native villages for what is also called the Spring Festival. It’s tempting to draw an analogy between packed train carriages and flocks of sheep, but, as anyone who has traveled in China during peak periods knows, you need to be much more of a ram if you’re going to stand any hope of getting aboard. Gong xi fa cai! Good luck and prosperity in 2015. ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. 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