Building The Universe

The GitHub brand is a unique creature. It's essentially two parallel stories running in conjunction - the developer’s world and Mona’s. One link between these two dimensions are the characters. Octocats roam these distant planets and are meant to represent human developers. These innovative and pioneering specimens are comprised of all types of characters, no matter the age, shape, color or background. Both groups have similar goals in life which are based on GitHub’s core principles. This framework makes the brand consistent, relatable, flexible, and most of all entertaining.

It started with an octocat…

Mascots

Mrs Mona Lisa Octocat, or Mona, has been the GitHub mascot since 2008. We call her our mascot. The “Invertocat” is our logo and represents the octocat/developer species, one of which is Mona. If octocats represent developers and Mona is the company mascot, then it’s fair to equate her to a brand bullhorn through which we broadcast our message. Whether it be introducing new features, technology or company culture, Mona will innovate her way through any problem. She’s our protagonist forever eager to change the world for the better.

Her cast of characters has grown over the years. She’s always been flanked by her trusty sidekick robot, Hubot, but there’s always room for more. We’ve integrated elements from the company culture, ecosystem and workflow into our parallel universe. We’ve used Atom as a representation of a power source, Hubot is our trusty chat ops bot, and so on. Our suite of bots is growing which means our cast will too.

Character Briefs

We created some character descriptions for the cast and related brand guidelines.

Shape Language

It’s important for us to visually link Mona’s Universe and the GitHub platform. She represents the brand so consistency is important when crossing over, particularly in the storytelling realm. So we took a page from the Disney playbook, and developed our own shape language. For those who don’t know…

“It's a signature shape language that unifies the film by using the same visual vernacular and guiding design principles throughout every scene and setting” (Disney's definition).

And what better language than our open source octicon set? It’s the icon set that navigates our users through the app. Commit symbols, merge, clone, and even shipit squirrels are all recognized by developers who use our platform. Our users already understand these shapes so the transition into Mona’s world should be seamless. The team created sets, furniture, gadgets, plants and more, all based on the octicon library.

Future Possibilities

Where do we go from here? We’ve only begun to scratch the surface. There are endless ways we can leverage our brand story to connect with users and fans. We toyed with the idea of an open source video game - to collaborate in 16 bit format. We’ve also discussed an animated comic, another animated short and more.

Storytelling is the key and if done right, this could be something special.

My Role

I joined GitHub in 2012 as the first in-house animator. Over the past 10 years I’ve helped build a team, develop a pipeline and expand a brand. Our team is small so we’ve all had to wear a variety of hats. My most notable one, team lead.