Friday February 20, 2009
Mascots in Design
One of the things you'll notice about the Japanese is that they seem to have a mascot for just about everything. I think my favorite has to be Tama the feline train station manager for Kishi Station. Tama has certainly been good for business (increasing the stations passengers by about 200,000 a year!), but how well do mascots work in North America?
Let's take a look at some design mascots and see how they stand up.
Probably one of the current favorites has to be the Twitter bird. The mascot is simply designed and goes great with Twitters minimalistic approach. I wonder what mascot they would have used if Twitter had been called My.Stat.Us as originally planned?
You can't talk about the Twitter bird without mentioning his unlucky cousin the Fail Whale. I don't know if this was an ingenious marketing plan or just a mistake, but it's pretty rare that people will actually smile and cheer when your service is down. I guess it's just so much fun to yell out "Fail Whale!"
I don't know what it is, but there's something about the Drupal Drip that scares me. What is he smiling about? Why is he wearing that Hamburglar mask? Nothing says 'default installation' quite like the Drupal Drip.
You can't talk evil mascots without mentioning Microsoft's Clippy. Few mascots have inspired the rage that poor Clippy did. I know your Mom thinks he's adorable, but trust me, he was annoying.
I'm not sure why Livejournal came up with a goat as their mascot; especially one who eats as much pants as Frank. Now don't get me wrong, Frank is cool, but he's a little unusual.
In a equally strange choice, we have Mike the Winamp Llama. Mike has a hard life being nothing more that Winamp's whipping boy, so I can't wait for the day that Mike decides to bite back!
Tux the Linux Penguin is a cute little fellow, but I have to say that he makes me think the Linux operating system must be a little slow and dumpy.
I certainly think that a well designed, non-creepy mascot can do wonders for a brand (not you WalMart!), and it's definitely a trend that's going hard in web design. The whole idea is to make it cute and make it fit.
I'm sure there's hundreds of design mascots that I've missed, so if you have a favorite, please post a comment!
funny, web design
@Kim I totally forgot about Firefox Fox!
@Chris Oops…yes ‘rage’ was definitely the word.
— Travis King · Feb 20, 12:53 PM · #
Is it bad that when Firefox first came out, I liked it mainly because a Fox is the logo and I like foxes?? I love the alterations for Firefox. Like with the angry fox gnawing on the iE logo.
— Kim · Feb 20, 12:10 PM · #