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This American Life ‘s Ira Glass tells BuzzFeed about the radio-inspired stories gracing today’s Google homepage, as well as his own Valentine’s Day plans.
Had things gone according to plan, This American Life would have graced Google's homepage this Fourth of July.
"But I knew that'd be trickier, because it's not a holiday that carries as much strong emotion and feeling," Ira Glass, host of the popular weekly public radio show that's partnered to host today's Google Doodle, tells BuzzFeed.
So instead, Glass and his crew circumvented the regular Doodle lead time of about four months and rolled out a love-themed audio package that captures the show's honed spirit of plaintive narrative. If you visit Google.com today, you'll find six candy hearts. When you click on one, it plays one of six sound clips of real people telling a micro-love story, while stick figure-type illustrations act out each tale.
Glass and Google hatched the collaboration idea after Glass spoke at Google's Mountain View campus back in December. Both parties were interested, but there was a sticking point right away: The radio host wasn't too keen on the traditional Doodle format, which commemorates mostly big events and bigwigs.
"In our first meeting [about it], Ira slammed his hand on the table and said, 'Why can't we just celebrate regular people?'" Jen Hom, a "Doodler" and illustrator at Google, says. "We all looked at him like he was insane, because traditionally we only celebrate really famous people and big holidays like Fourth of July and Valentine's Day [in Google Doodles]. He was like, 'Why can't we have a regular person just talking on the homepage?' And we were like, 'Cool idea, but we don't know if that's actually possible.' It turns out it's totally possible."
With the green light, Glass and his radio crew produced six 90-second vignettes: three stories that had already aired on This American Life — ones deemed simple enough to recast in a short snippet — and three new ones which Glass and Co. aimed to represent "a diversity of voices," including at least one couple who wasn't straight. The animated tales include a man who meets his wife on a blind date after crushing on her TV appearance, a middle school boy who harbors a crush on a girl at his school dance, and a woman whose newlywed doubt is quickly eased by her husband's gentle spirit.
The stories were originally supposed to be stand-alone audio recordings with simple "press play"-type buttons, but Hom and her team thought that such a unique theme required special treatment.
"When you go to the Google homepage, you're not just sitting there listening to a story the way you would in your car," she says. "With audio storytelling, you need to keep your users visually stimulated." The Google illustrators decided to cast each story in simple line figure animations, of the sort one might draw in elementary school.
"We wanted to avoid having the illustrations depict exactly what's being said," Glass says. "Instead they kind of riff on what's being said, in this way that's so sweet."
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