How to Design a Mascot for Your Brand

The story of how we designed the new face of our company.

A good first impression is about the personality of the brand…

The JotForm team recently decided to have a mascot. We believe mascots help brands engage their users and provide a more effective impression on them, rather than being a faceless company.

It is a very important and critical process to design our mascot because it will represent our company on several mediums and it will communicate with our user on our behalf. Our mascot designing process involved the whole JotForm team. After much work we finally ended up with Podo.

Here are some key steps which our team focused on while creating our new mascot:

Define Your Brand’s Goals

As the JotForm Design team we started the design process by defining our branding and marketing strategies and answering some critical questions such as:

• How the mascot will help to develop our communication with our users?
• In which mediums will we use it?
• How will it help us to announce our new features and products?

Outlining the strategies behind our mascot helped us create a starting point for the design process.

Think of Your Mascot as a Team Member

The design team started creating an identity and a personality for the new mascot. We wanted to find a new team member whom we would be loved by our team and by our loyal users.

Identify Traits

We created some key words before starting: fun, clever, playful, slightly mischievous, eye-catching, trustworthy, cute, caring, cuddly, loyal, friendly, memorable, recognizable and consistent with our branding.

Design Process

• Research: Start with looking at other brand mascots and try to find their purposes.
• Sketch: Once we had some ideas on the mascot we started to sketch them on paper. We repeated it again and again until we were satisfied with the results.

• Discuss: We organized team meetings regularly and provided feedback to each other on ideas and designs. This process allowed us to get close to the final form of our mascot design, and avoid taking wrong paths.
• Digitally Illustrate: I believe the best mascots are the simple ones and they are also unforgettable. My mascot design was built on our keywords: cute, trustworthy and caring. I decided to reflect the tone of our branding into Podo.

I believe the best mascots are the simple ones and they are also unforgettable.

While designing Podo we always kept these questions in mind:

• Is it unique? Your mascot is a reflection of your brand. So it should not be boring, and it should be unique to your brand. It should not be confused with other mascots.
• Is it simple enough? Can users identify it easily? A good test of this is if it can be used as a silhouette.
• Is the mascot open to other mediums? Is it adaptable for special events such as Halloween? Having an adaptable mascot enables you to do animated videos, gifs, infographics, t-shirts, stickers, newsletters, easter eggs and much more.

Our team and our users love the final design of Podo. We are very excited about the possibilities.

Now, it’s your turn to design an amazing mascot for your own brand.