Pegman
Year First Appeared
2007
Creator
Ryan Germick, Andy Szybalski
The yellow humanoid figure used to drag onto Google Maps to enter Street View, introduced alongside the launch of Street View in May 2007. Designed by Ryan Germick and Andy Szybalski at Google as a 32-pixel icon, Pegman is the connective tissue between the 2D map and the ground-level photograph — a tiny avatar that lets the user tell the system, "put me there."
Importance in Internet Culture
Pegman solved a real human-computer interaction problem the design team called "the Subway Effect" — the disorientation of dropping from a top-down map straight into a 360-degree photo with no anchor for which way you're facing. By giving users a figure they had to physically place on the map, Google gave them agency and orientation, and made Street View — an enormous data-collection effort with no obvious user metaphor — feel like a feature rather than a database query. Pegman is one of the more durable UI characters in mainstream software, surviving multiple Maps redesigns, mobile rewrites, and the 2013 Maps overhaul that briefly tried to do without him.
Interesting Fact
Before settling on a yellow humanoid, the design team prototyped an eyeball ("squishy and wrong," Szybalski told BuzzFeed), a tofu cube, and a Pegwoman. The original sketch was modeled on Germick's father. Over the years, Pegman has been swapped out for situational variants: a leprechaun on St. Patrick's Day, an alien near Area 51, a Sherlock Holmes silhouette at 221B Baker Street, a TARDIS at certain Doctor Who locations, and a DeLorean for Back to the Future Day. Germick now leads Google's Doodle team.