Today’s clever Google Doodle

Today’s Goodle Doodle celebrates the 200th birthday of the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott with a detail from the gothic building at the front of St Pancras Station – to many Londoners at least the most familiar example of his work.  The doodle is a clever piece of visual design because the two Os and the L in the word Google are formed by architectural features, leaving just the Gs and the E to be represented by letters.

For a business which is usually associated with very sparse, simply designed web pages, Google is very inventive in its use of little decorative flourishes like this one

The end of cheques

In the UK at least, the end of cheques has been postponed indefinitely – they may only be used for a small proportion of banking transactions, but the 2018 deadline that the British banks had set for their abolition has apparently been deferred indefinitely.

So, as an exercise to anybody with a keen eye for banking stationery, readers are invited to guess the age of the photo used to illustrate http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/jul/12/cheques-abolition-plan-scrapped .  No prizes, just a bit of kudos to anybody who can improve on my (fairly precise) guess.  Answers in comments on the blog please