--- title: Ida B. Wells: Today's Google Doodle Celebrates Her Birthday description: The Google Doodle celebrates journalist and activist Ida B. Wells' 153rd birthday. canonical: https://time.com/3960699/google-doodle-ida-b-wells/ author: Tessa Berenson article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-07-16T13:48:45.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:48:20.430Z og:title: Today's Google Doodle Celebrates Journalist Ida B. Wells' Birthday og:description: She was a journalist, newspaper editor and civil rights activist og:url: https://time.com/3960699/google-doodle-ida-b-wells/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde8164797f872e1b/69885b298e060151614616a2/ida-b-wells-153rd-birthday.jpg?branch=production&width=711&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 711 og:image:height: 400 og:image:alt: ida-b-wells-153rd-birthday og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Today's Google Doodle Celebrates Journalist Ida B. Wells' Birthday twitter:description: She was a journalist, newspaper editor and civil rights activist twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde8164797f872e1b/69885b298e060151614616a2/ida-b-wells-153rd-birthday.jpg?branch=production&width=711&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Today's Google Doodle Celebrates Journalist Ida B. Wells' Birthday > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-sub-2026q3/newsletters?i=67cb0299-1559-4928-93d7-aabf7d08d37a&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) * TIME Subscriptions: [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-sub-2026q3/subscribe?i=67cb0299-1559-4928-93d7-aabf7d08d37a&cr=time-sub-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 [Tessa Berenson](https://time.com/author/tessa-berenson/)  ## Tessa Berenson Jul 16, 2015 1:48 PM UTC  Google  by [Tessa Berenson](https://time.com/author/tessa-berenson/)  ## Tessa Berenson Jul 16, 2015 1:48 PM UTC Today is Ida B. Wells’ 153rd birthday, and the Google Doodle is celebrating her accordingly with a sketch of the famous journalist and activist sitting at her desk working at a typewriter. Wells was a journalist and newspaper editor at the turn of the 20th century who documented civil rights abuses and worked toward women’s suffrage. She was editor of two papers in Memphis by the time she was 25, and later moved to Chicago where she ran the _Chicago Conservator_. Calling her “fearless and uncompromising,” [Google explained](https://www.google.com/doodles/ida-b-wells-153rd-birthday) its choice to honor her in the Doodle: “We salute Ida B. Wells with a Doodle that commemorates her journalistic mettle and her unequivocal commitment to the advancement of civil liberties.” ## Transcript [00:01] >>The Doodle [00:07] team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, [00:10] and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even [00:13] sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially [00:17] collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate [00:21] with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on [00:25] this project. [00:34] >>We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and [00:36] we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, [00:39] flowers and things like that. But Ira and his [00:44] team are awesome. [00:44] >>They were able to pull stories that they have collected [00:47] over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and [00:49] they're all about love in all different respects of the word. [00:55] They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really [00:58] fun and really sweet. [00:59] >>The stories run the [ unk ]. There is [01:03] a story about middle school love. [01:03] >>I was in the cafeteria, just got [01:07] on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. [01:11] >>There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that [01:14] she made a mistake. [01:14] >>My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I [01:14] could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and [01:20] I-- and I called the police because I thought [01:24] he got lost or something happened. [01:28] >>When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I [01:31] listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of [01:34] where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. [01:37] >>One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. [01:43] We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just [01:46] drew everyone as a dog. [01:47] >>Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. [01:47] >>And when you click on it, the heart will flip, [01:52] the audio will play and you will also see the images that [01:55] we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, [01:59] now we are all going to brainstorms together because we [02:02] need the creative side and we also need the technical side [02:04] to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this [02:08] one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, [02:12] because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I [02:15] first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only [02:17] did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more [02:21] animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we [02:24] needed a dedicated team. [02:24] >>Some of our most like ambitious to those have come [02:26] from engineers that are just incredibly talented [02:30] and spare similar time for our projects. [02:33] >>Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that [02:36] is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology [02:41] hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too [02:43] conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to [02:46] tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. [02:53] The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep [02:56] my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting [03:00] a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw [03:03] and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." [03:07] >>We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. [03:08] We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences [03:11] are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what [03:14] you're gonna get. 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