Brand mascot design - The Elephant In The Room

An elephant of substance

To ensure Ollie was relatable to the clients of the company, he had to experience the same trials and situations they would experience. With this in mind, we created a whole family structure for him, parents, children and a wife. All of the various drawings enable a fully fleshed-out character, that has real emotion and that the viewing audience can empathise with. This is important as it's this emotive aspect of the character design, that is key to its success as a brand mascot.

about this project

The Brief: To Design a brand mascot for a national will writing company.

I was approached by Rebekah of The Will Writing Partnership. She has an idea for a brand mascot but didn't know how to bring it to life. She knew she wanted an elephant as the "elephant in the room" is something that is often associated with the difficult subject of death and wills.

The idea was to create a brand mascot that would become relatable to the clients, and who could be used across all of their communications both on and offline. It also had to be something the company could use on its merchandise too.

After having a chat with Rebekah, it was clear that she had a lot of great ideas for Ollie (she already had a name in mind too!) as well as a list of initial situations Ollie was to be involved in. So we got started on some preliminary sketches to rough out the starts of life for Ollie.

The idea was that he was to be a long term mascot, and so we had to come up with a backstory for him, as well as show him in many of life's big ups and downs. So from the basic sketches, we managed to create a full story for Ollie, and create a series of events that will befall his life over the next few years.