Every brand has a logo. I wanted ours to have a voice as well: someone who could open our videos, explain what we do, and make people smile while doing it. That someone is ONKA. Here is how he came together, including the versions that didn't make it.
Where it started
Two things were on my mind. One was Duolingo's owl, a mascot people talk about like a friend. The other was a startup's launch film where a small character did the talking. I wanted ours done our own way. They showed me what a character can do for a brand: it makes a company feel like someone.
The first boy
I started with a person: a young engineer, the kind of person who builds things at ONKA. Deep brown skin, a black high-top, a white jacket with black pockets. We explored him in a few directions.
Every round, I pushed him further from realism. He got younger, rounder and simpler, until he was more toy than person.
Too real
Then we built him in 3D, in Blender. With real light on him, he looked like a person again, and that wasn't what I had in mind.
We tried him flat, like a cartoon, and then in print dots, like an old comic. Some came close. None of them felt like ours.
The logo was the character
Then I had a bigger idea. Our logo is an O and a K, cut into three black pieces. What if the mark itself was the character?
Then the face. The obvious place was the white band that runs through the mark. But in our real logo that band is empty space, not white. So I came up with two ideas. One put an eye on each piece. The other was an egg: a white egg held inside the black pieces, so the white finally had a reason to be there.
The egg was him.
His name is ONKA
He took the company's name. From now on he is the one who talks for us, in anything we make that has a voice. The boy went on the shelf.
Building him
ONKA was modelled in Blender, piece by piece, and checked against the concept until his front view matched it. I wanted him exact, down to the softer K from the concept rather than the sharper one in our logo file.
He has no nose. His eyes and mouth have black outlines, so when he blinks or closes his mouth, each becomes a single clean line.
He moves like a bouncy toy: bendy limbs, arms shaped like fins, shoes that roll from heel to toe.
Then he needed a voice. It had to sound like a small, cute toy: playful, but not too high-pitched. It took seven tries to find it.
His first film
His first job was to introduce himself. Two storyboards didn't make it. One put him in a hard hat on a factory floor. The other was all layout and no life.
What made it was motion: bold type landing on the beat, and ONKA bursting out of our logo to walk you through what we do.
ONKA will be hosting our videos from here on. And if you'd like a character like him for your own brand, that is something we make.