Making memorable mascots: An inside look

Ubuntu is known for a variety of reasons: enterprise-grade security and performance, accessible UI, and, of course, our mascots. For those that use and love Ubuntu, mascots have grown to have a life of their own.

How does that happen? Who’s behind the magic? In this month’s newsletter, we’re unveiling the maker behind the mascots: the process behind the scenes that brings each to life, and how they integrate with Canonical’s core principles. We met with Marcus Haslam, Canonical alumnus and design extraordinaire, to get a behind-the-scenes take.

At the beginning: A tweak to the logo

Marcus joined Canonical before 2008, to redesign the logos of Canonical and Ubuntu. However, thoughtful design functions in a network, as part of a whole: so changing something as central to a brand as a logo would mean that everything else needed to shift too.

Six months later, Marcus found himself working alongside the leadership team to overhaul our entire design language. The project began with identifying the values at the heart of Canonical, which guide our work to this day: adroit, reliable, accessible, and precise. This might sound simple, but is a crucial step – as Marcus explains, they became an anchor which keeps the design language cohesive.

“We started off with the values early on, so we could review the work and ask: does it reflect these values?”

Following brand values came the logo redesign and the creation of the Ubuntu font. The design team behind the new Ubuntu typeface was carefully chosen, and included font-royalty Vincent Connare – designer of Comic Sans and Trebuchet MS. The project was released to the public with Ubuntu 10.10, Maverick Meerkat.

“It was a fascinating project. There were so many different fonts out there in the wild, in different forums, that the community was using – so I suggested that we design a font. It was one way we could make everything feel consistent. We got the community involved, and asked for feedback.”

In 2011, London’s Design Museum recognized the impact of the Ubuntu font in its “Shape My Language” exhibition, a rare honor for a typeface.

In 2023, in partnership with Type Network, Canonical released an update to the Ubuntu font, introducing Ubuntu Sans and Ubuntu Sans Mono (pictured). The update offers various improvements, including enhanced legibility and improved sizing.

Process: Creating mascots that feel like Ubuntu

Each mascot is an individual, and the design style has shifted over time, from the painterly Hardy Heron (8.04 LTS), to the origami-style Xenial Xerus (16.04 LTS) and geometry of Focal Fossa (20.04 LTS), and now, a precise but playful line-art style, integrated within a wider whole, as we see in Plucky Puffin (25.04), Questing Quokka (25.10) and Resolute Racoon (26.04 LTS). We showcased the development of our mascots’ design style from Karmic Koala to Noble Numbat in a video we released as part of our 20 year anniversary in 2024. Nevertheless, each mascot is inherently Ubuntu. There isn’t a shortcut to that – it comes from effort and iteration.

After he’s given the mascot name, Marcus spends time researching the animal, and thinking about the relationship between the adjective – what it represents, how it feels, and what it means – and the animal itself.

Take, for example, Stonking Stingray, which is currently in development. As Marcus explains, “a stingray glides through the water in an amazing way.” This delicate, balletic movement creates an interesting tension with the phonetic weight of “stonking,”which refers to something “exceptionally large, impressive, or extremely good.”

Simultaneously, each mascot has to represent, in some way, the release itself: Resolute Raccoon needed to visually communicate the robustness and strength of the LTS. The design process is a matter of navigating the tension between release, animal, and adjective through craft.

Inspiring human-first design

Though the hard work mainly goes on behind the scenes, Marcus notes how this effort is felt in the final product: “people do notice the difference” when an item has been carefully crafted.

“The difference may be subtle, it might not be obvious why. But you do notice the difference. There’s a depth to good design, and a human side to it as well. If we craft something, it looks sophisticated, because we take care.”

Marcus highlights something important about our work at Canonical: humanity is at the center of what we do, whether we’re working on visual design, UX, or software engineering. You can see iterations of it across our releases: from Ubuntu 4.10, which we mailed in CD format to any user who requested it, to quality of life fixes. Thinking about what will make our products easier and more resilient for users is key to our mission.

In Ubuntu 26.10, we’re continuing to make Ubuntu human-friendly and more accessible to more people through features like Project Myna, which will bring speech to text dictation to Ubuntu desktop.

A stonking new addition

Stay tuned to see our upcoming mascot for Ubuntu 26.10 Stonking Stingray and learn about the latest roadmap developments on Ubuntu Discourse.