{"id":389,"date":"2014-08-28T06:15:28","date_gmt":"2014-08-28T13:15:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog?p=389"},"modified":"2016-02-25T05:24:13","modified_gmt":"2016-02-25T05:24:13","slug":"how-to-design-mascot-for-startup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/how-to-design-mascot-for-startup\/","title":{"rendered":"How to design a Mascot for Startups?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span id=\"rgb(187, 172, 133)\"><\/span><!--Apply Baner Image bg color--><\/p>\n<p>Have you ever wondered why the <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">Mascot<\/span> of <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">McDonald<\/span> strikes your mind like a bolt when you think of Mcburger? It&#8217;s because their mascot has attracted you to the core that you might even dream of it while you are asleep. <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">Mascot<\/span> is one of the best <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">marketing tools<\/span>. It is the face of your startup&#8217;s brand to the world. When a mascot is so important in churning out revenue for your business, the effort taken in designing a mascot should not be minimal. Everyone needs a mascot today to endorse their brand. But designing a mascot is not a hard nut to crack. You might have already come across various steps to create a mascot. So, we thought, providing an <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">insight<\/span> into our <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">personal experiences<\/span> would prove to be beneficial.<\/p>\n<h3>Think outside the Box<\/h3>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Think-outside-the-Box\" src=\"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Think-outside-the-Box.jpg\" \/> Arriving at a <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">concept<\/span> that suits your business the best is the basic step when you are designing a mascot. Animaker is a <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">DIY<\/span> video making app that brings <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">studio quality<\/span> animation tools within the reach of everyone. So, once we understood the basic requirements, we turned our attention to animals that would reflect our brand in the most appropriate way. Guess what? We found something alarming, there was no animal left to endorse our brand. Every other animal had been used by some brand already. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hongkiat.com\/blog\/21-excellent-examples-of-animal-as-web-mascots\/\">(List of Cute Animal Mascot from hongkiat Blog)<\/a> When a mascot is something that makes you stand out from the crowd, choosing an already used animal would be pointless. So with animals knocked out from our list, we wanted our mascot to signify something that could do <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">wonders<\/span> of its own. So we narrowed our thoughts to a <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">robot<\/span> and an <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">alien<\/span>. There came a next hurdle knocking our doors. We saw that a few other brands had already used robot as their mascot. For example <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">Reddit<\/span> had a simple alien as their mascot. <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">Alexis Ohanian<\/span> founder of <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">Reddit, Bread-pig<\/span> and <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">Hipmunk<\/span> is a complete inspirational for anyone who creates Mascot design for their start-ups. <img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Reddit-mascot\" class=\"fLeftO\" src=\"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Reddit-mascot.jpg\" \/> <span style=\"font-size: 14px; color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">Credits :<\/span> <a style=\"font-size: 14px;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.reddit.com\/\">Reddit<\/a> So we started researching on how to make our robot different from the rest. Compared with others, our Mascot has to do lot more jobs than just getting displayed in a website or printing, it has to come in videos, must be easy to <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">animate<\/span>, it has to <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">sing, dance, laugh and cry<\/span>. OMG, it has to be a\u00a0<span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">\u201cRockstar\u201d.<\/span>\u00a0Yet, it has to look <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">simple, less fancy<\/span> and pleasing enough for kids in its <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">2D look<\/span>.<\/p>\n<h3>It\u2019s all in the eyes<\/h3>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"It\u2019s-all-in-the-eyes\" src=\"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/It\u2019s-all-in-the-eyes.jpg\" \/> We were very keen on the point that our mascot must reflect what we do, with just a single look. <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">Eyes<\/span> can communicate a wealth of <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">emotions<\/span>. So we decided to have a single eye which is not scary but appealing. <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">Single eye<\/span> gave that alien look to our mascot.<\/p>\n<h3>Brand characteristics<\/h3>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Brand- characteristics\" src=\"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Brand-characteristics.jpg\" \/> Animaker is a <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">shockingly simple app<\/span> but powerful enough to do some tough animation tasks. So we tried to inculcate simplicity in our mascot too. The arms were made flexible to show that Animaker is much <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">flexible<\/span> and <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">user friendly<\/span>. And we even added wheels in the place of legs to show how fast Animaker is.<\/p>\n<h3>Kid friendly<\/h3>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Kid-friendly\" src=\"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Kid-friendly.jpg\" \/> Usually when a kid likes something, everyone likes it too, but it\u2019s not the same, it&#8217;s the other way around. So we decided that our mascot must be <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">funny, pleasing, kiddish<\/span> and <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">attractive<\/span>. At the same time it must reflect our brand identity. So we designed Animaker mascot in a way that kids would love it to the core.<\/p>\n<h3>Colours speak all languages<\/h3>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Colours-speak-all-languages\" src=\"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Colours-speak-all-languages.jpg\" \/> Adding the right colour is an important step. Each <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">colour<\/span> has its own meaning. Animaker is basically associated with fun as it makes videos with lots of color and animations. We chose few colours that denoted <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">fun<\/span> and <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">enthusiasm<\/span>. At last we were in a dilemma to choose between the two colours, <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">Blue<\/span> and <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">Purple<\/span>. So, to make this interesting, we conducted a poll to see which colour wins. <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">Purple<\/span> won the race by a very slight margin.<\/p>\n<h3>First impression is the best impression<\/h3>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"First-impression-is-the-best-impression\" src=\"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/6-First-impression-is-the-best-impression.jpg\" \/> A <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">first look<\/span> is very important for a mascot. We had designed the first look with a <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">\u201cHi\u201d<\/span> gesture to welcome any new users to the app. We also worked on some minute things that could add life to the robot like the <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">antenna<\/span> and the <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">meter<\/span> as its heart. In the later stages we appended a magician hat and a wand to the mascot to stress on the point that Animaker is a <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">magical tool<\/span> that helps you <span style=\"color: #6d47b1; font-weight: bold;\">own your own studio<\/span>.<\/p>\n<h3>Experimentation is essential<\/h3>\n<p>We had started the mascot design when the Animaker was in testing phase, so we had a good time on trying out different things, introducing inside the office, shared basic stickers to Kids, got direct feedback from top designers. Things we learnt out of this mascot design are ways to work agile, learning by doing and continuous improvement until you love what you have!<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever wondered why the Mascot of McDonald strikes your mind like a bolt when you think of Mcburger? It&#8217;s because their mascot has attracted you to the core that you might even dream of it while you are asleep. Mascot is one of the best marketing tools. It is the face of your [&hellip;]<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1036,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,87],"tags":[12,34,48,49,50,70],"table_tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1190,"href":"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions\/1190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389"},{"taxonomy":"table_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.animaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/table_tags?post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}