I have always been a huge fan of website mascots, they are not just great marketing tool, but also a fantastic way for people to relate to their provider, plus for us, it’s a fun way to express ideas by utilizing the mascot, you can create cartoons, explanatory graphics, etc .. much nicer than plain text and a chart.
With that in mind, we decided to create one for VPS.NET .. here is it’s story.
We had this idea of a nice design representing the VPS Cloud, an array of nodes (Hypervisors & Data) being worked on by little men, such a construction site .. that idea was fun, but quickly we realized that was the wrong message, a “construction site” might lead people to perceive the cloud as still “under construction” .. there fore, an “unfinished” product… not the message we wish to relay.
While we all know that we will always be working on the VPS Cloud, to create new features and improve on it’s specs, we wanted a more mature image, so instead of a construction site with little men, we went for a finished VPS Cloud type setup with little robots maintaining it. 🙂
The next task was, what kind of robot ?, since the VPS Cloud is an omnidirectional object, the robot will need to move in all 3 axis (X,Y,Z), so we did away with legs and gave him a propulsion system that allows him to hover and fly anywhere, second, since he needs to receive data in real time from the Cloud Control, he got an antenna, and last, due to the complexity of tasks and maintenance he must perform, a tool-belt and flexible arms were added …
This was the first sketch of the mascot on the white board (proud to say I did it myself.. hehe):
We where quite pleased with it, so the go ahead was given for Everaldo (outstanding Brazilian artist who is working here in the UK office with us on this and other projects)to clean it up and vectorize it .. and in no time, he had a final design that blew us all away:
What do you guys/gals think ? we quite love it, and the best part is we dont believe we are plagiarizing anybody else, also, the idea will be we will have multiple color and configurations of the robot for different tasks.
We are now trying to come up with a name for this one, as he will be the default mascot, so please, if you have any suggestions, do post them in the VPS.NET Blog 🙂
Looks good! Using the filename vps-net-ad.jpg might not be so advisable though – Adblock did its job perfectly in swallowing up that “ad”, leaving me thinking “so where’s this new design, then?” 🙂
Ha … I see, never tought of that, I will change it’s name :p