The Challenges

Before I joined the team, this odd little creature was predominately illustrated in her typical pose. In order to give her believability we, as a company, had to draw some lines in the sand.

This beloved character’s unanswered questions drew a healthy debate between hubbers (employees). The only reference point I had was the original logo, which had some physical anomalies. Did she have 8 tentacles (3 hidden) or 5? Was that raised appendage a tail or tentacle? Where the hell are her eyebrows?!

The Head

We began with her profile. The Octocat is the sum of two merged animals, but where does one animal begin and the other end?

Anthropomorphizing animals is nothing new to character design. It helps create relatable characters through common traits we find in our own species. Eyes are often anthropomorphized because of their importance for visual communication. They emote and give personality, which is why we felt they would be important to emphasize.

To give the Octocat more appeal, we extended her nose and mouth off her face giving the slight impression of a snout. Her original ears and whiskers are important for recognition so we didn’t alter them. We choose to stretch the Octopus epidermis from her tentacles to her head giving her that smooth texture commonly found in sea creatures. This helps to reduce surface friction while swimming and helps to alleviate the unseemly byproduct of cat fur - hair balls. Here is one of our early concepts:

Tentacles

Our next challenge was the tentacle count. Does she have eight tentacles, five, or four legs and a tail? This particular dilemma has long been a point of contention and debate among GitHubbers. In the two dimensional world it was easy to leave this question ambiguously unanswered, but in three dimensions we were finally forced to choose.

Part of the beauty of the Octocat is her paradoxical nature, being a mixture of creatures stuck between worlds. She has been represented as a quadruped, a biped, and a “pentaped”, but never an “octoped”. While we absolutely respect the opinion of our eight-tentacle-favoring-friends, with eight she would feel inauthentic, so we chose to stick with five.

With the tentacle count question settled, we focused next on her stance. With any mascot, recognition is paramount. Our goal was to design the figurine so the front view would look as close to the original logo as possible. The Octocat is both a land and sea creature. She is quick and limber. Gravity and balance are less challenging under water but when she moves onto dry land these elements prove to be much more difficult. You’ll notice her original stance does not take this into consideration. If we want to keep the exact same tentacle pose from the front, it would have to be one of these two choices:

These two options didn’t work because of how unnatural they felt, so we decided to make a compromise. In the interest of creating a cartoony yet believable organic creature we had to do some repositioning. The end result was a pentagon configuration which would serve as the base of her tentacles. This meant the elasticity of the tentacles would absorb the weight of her large head, giving them a more round organic shape.