It may have been the most consequential out-of-the-office message in design history. On Aug. 30, 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page left the office of their Silicon Valley start-up to attend the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. They placed a man-on-fire stick figure behind their home-page logo: a hieroglyph telling users, in effect, "If the servers melt down, sorry. We're away." A little over a year later, at 3 a.m. on Oct. 31, Brin slapped a pair of pixelated clip-art pumpkins over the oo in Google, this time to show users that they were in the office working nonstop...
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