Google has taken the opportunity of its 12th Birthday to celebrate what you can achieve with a few lines of code and the effectiveness of interacting.

It’s the latest in a long line of “doodles” that create Google’s logo in a range of attention grabbing ways, creating the logo on its homepage out of a set of bouncing “balls” has been their latest acheivement. The balls swirl around the page whenever your mouse gets near it, in pretty much every type of updated browser.

Google officially opened 12 years ago in Menlo Park California, but rather than reminiscing, Google is striving to remain innovating and the latest logo shows this as it demonstrates a new version of computer code. The ‘bouncing balls’ actually consist of multiple pieces of a web page, each using a modern form of web coding called CSS3 – “Cascading Style Sheet” elements. Each circle is itself an individual element or “div” which contains an command in its associated piece of CSS3 to make it circular rather than square or rectangular. The code also contains instructions so that if the cursor is moved near to any of the “bubbles”, they try to move away.

The aim of the logo seems to be to draw attention to the importance of CSS3, an emerging standard which is being developed as the next version of the web language HTML, called HTML5. They both offer many more possibilities for the design of web pages, which could be more interactive with less effort by designers, which may be why Google are so eager to push it.

The majority of users seem to have reacted well to the bubbles - finding them entertaining rather than tedious or annoying.