One of the funnest experiences we’ve had in recent time was the mascot design for Mr.Bucks. I mean, take a look at this guy. He’s got style, cool, pizzaz and cash dripping offa him. The client wanted to make sure that Mr.Bucks was anything but your average cartoon elephant. They key words in the creative brief were confident, confident and you guessed it, CONFIDENT.
Other traits we had to incorporate into the design were movement, perfection and confidence. Oh yeah, we already mentioned that three times already … but it was important. If you look at Mr.Bucks you’ll see he walks tall and assertively without being overbearing or too aggressive. He still comes across as someone you could approach but you realize that whatever you say better be interesting and to the point because this guy has work to do.
Working with the client we narrowed down a look and feel that we could use as a base and then with some tweaking, the final sketch was approved. From there, it was down to picking the colors which would work well to enforce the raw strength of this character.
Graham Mulvein at Cochlear UK got in touch with us wanting a new character to help communicate what can be somewhat dry information about their technology. For those of you who are unaware, Cochlear makes incredible ear implants that, well … here’s what wikipedia as to say about the cochlear implant:
A cochlear implant (CI) is a surgically implanted electronic device that provides a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. The cochlear implant is often referred to as a bionic ear. Unlike hearing aids, the cochlear implant does not amplify sound, but works by directly stimulating any functioning auditory nerves inside the cochlea with an electric field.
Pretty cool right!? This technology is giving hearing to millions of people and it was up to our artists to create a new mascot for Cochlear that was fun, kept the spirit of the Cochlear branding and their mission. In the end Grahame and his team settled on this little fella. Check him out!
We were contacted by Mathew Ogston at FollowThing.com in order to create a cartoon character to use as a mascot for their upcoming project. This character was an interesting challenge due to the inherent traits which Mathew wanted embodied in his … Thing!
Cartoon Lemming Character
Part of the Character Plan (or creative brief) included:
“Character is a Lemming, which represents our new product called ‘FollowThing’. The reason for using a lemming is that our online service allows people to follow almost anything on the web (blogs, news, videos, memes, audio, brand monitoring etc) and therefore keep abreast of the latest trends and breaking news. Lemmings are famously known for following things. This concept of ‘following’ needs to be visible within this mascot.”
It didn’t take too long until our artists were onto a character mascot that Mathew liked. We ended up tweaking back and forth until the final look of this cartoon mascot was achieved.
It was great working with Mathew and we wish him well with his Follow Thing start up!
