US National Parks Google doodle surfaces list of parks from Crater Lake to Acadia

Google is celebrating the US National Park Service centennial by replacing the logo on its US home page today with an illustrated video honoring the national park system and urging travelers to explore America’s protected lands.

“Designated in 1916, the National Park Service has set aside over 84 million acres of protected land for everyone to explore and enjoy,” reports the Google Doodle Blog.

Designed by doodler Sophie Diao, the US National Parks doodle leads to a search for “US National Parks” that surfaces a list of more than 45 national parks:

Clicking on one of the parks leads to the Google Destinations page for the park, offering an overview of the park, suggested itineraries, best times to visit and top sights:

The Google Doodle Blog included a backstory on Diao’s creation process for today’s doodle.

“When we first set about making this Doodle, we didn’t know where to begin,” says Diao. “The topic seemed so vast that it felt disingenuous to only focus on a few places, but it would be way too hard to doodle all 59 national parks! The only thing we knew for sure was that iron-on patches are awesome and we wanted to include them somehow.”

Diao said once the concept was finalized, she created storyboards using the park patches to move between different park scenes.

“Our production process was fairly straightforward — I painted each scene and passed it to Lydia [Lydia Nichols], who distilled the essence of my painting into a patch. Lydia painted the characters and animals, and I animated them.”

Diao says she hopes the doodle inspires everyone to enjoy the outdoors.

Earlier this year, Bing also honored America’s parks, partnering with the US National Park Service to host its #FindYourPark photo contest.