Gigi – Gemini Free For Students

A Spare-Time Doodle on a Global Stage

Some days are just different. You can spend years creating massive projections that can be seen from the sky, but nothing quite prepares you for the day a small character you drew to relax becomes the face of a global Google campaign, launched with a tweet from CEO Sundar Pichai. Seeing a meditative, spare-time doodle reach a global stage is why I’m still emotional about it all. Here’s to the silly ideas that turn into something more.

This little character was created to help announce a big idea: making Gemini Pro, Google’s flagship AI, free for university students. It was a real labour of love: I came up with all the ideas, drew Gigi by hand in Procreate, and animated it myself as part of the team in charge of all the campaign assets (creating a huge library of animations, including plenty that never even made it to air).

Role: Character Creator, Concept, Direction & Frame-by-Frame Animation.

The Journey of a Doodle

The character didn’t start with a brief, but on an iPad with a personal goal: to learn. For years, I’ve used personal projects like my Gastaloops GIF series to find my own voice. This started the exact same way, as an ongoing series in my spare time to teach myself simple character design and the craft of frame-by-frame cel animation.

The process was entirely hands-on, using Procreate to painfully draw each frame one by one. In an era defined by digital perfection, we made a conscious choice to embrace the wobbly lines and the warmth of the human touch. The character’s imperfect form is a deliberate visual metaphor, showing that Gemini is built to be an approachable learning companion, not a cold, intimidating machine.

I tapped back into my own memories for inspiration, revisiting the simple doodles I used to draw in the margins of my notebooks at university. The little dude went through plenty of iterations (and haircuts) along the way.

From a Sketch to the World Stage

A personal doodle doesn’t become a global campaign by accident. It takes an environment like Google Creative Lab, which has a rare culture of connecting technology and people through fiction, emotion, and surprise. This only happened because the leadership at the Lab believed in these rough illustrations and let them lead the campaign.

The launch on August 6, 2025 was surreal. It kicked off with Sundar Pichai’s post and an official Google announcement making the Google AI Pro plan, including Gemini 2.5 Pro and Deep Research tools, free for a full year to students across the U.S., Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, and Brazil. The character’s simple, universal design allowed it to live across landing pages and social channels worldwide, resonating especially strongly in Japan.

Of course, this was a massive team effort. My deepest thanks go to the leadership at the Lab for backing this direction and to the entire team across Google who brought it to life. Watching this little drawing grow into an official Google character means more to me than I can easily put into words. Even in the middle of an AI revolution, the most direct way to connect with people is still through something real, human, and slightly wobbly.

And then we finally revealed their name: Gigi!

Gigi Came Back This Year Too

The best part? Gigi didn’t just disappear after the first launch. Gigi came back this year too.

When I originally drew Gigi myself on my iPad in Procreate, I never imagined that this little hand-drawn character would not only become a global campaign, but return for a whole new back-to-uni season across the world, from new social animations announcing the student plan’s return to helping students tackle quadratic equations on the official Google Australia blog.