A revamp of our beloved Fedora characters

If you’ve been hanging around the Fedora Design team lately—or dropped by one of our recent Fedora Design Team Live Sessions —you may be aware of a very cool artwork project one of our interns has been working on. Lauryn Dake has done a revamp of the character designs for the entire cast of Fedora characters, including the Beefy Miracle, panda, and badges badger!

The idea here is our current character artwork is a bit dis-jointed. For example, the pandas in our badge system are drawn in a very different style than the badger, and the original Beefy Miracle artwork is in yet another older style. We want to give our characters all a fresher, more expressive look. Also, this allows them to hang together more cohesively under the same style / approach.

**A selection of older Fedora character artwork:** A smiling hotdog with animated mustard squirt (The Beefy Miracle), a blue and white panda waving on a Fedora bubble-shaped badge, a badger rocking out on a blue guitar in front a green starburst on a Fedora badge, and an orange panda and black and white badger as winged angels in front of a cloudy sky on a Fedora badge.

We wanted to share this ongoing project with you and get your feedback and ideas. How is your team using these characters? What poses for these characters would be helpful for you to have graphics of? What formats would you like some of the artwork in?

Meet the Fedora Panda

**The New Fedora Panda character sheet** – a happy go-lucky panda with glowing ears and a glowing nuclear symbol on her stomach, in a variety of poses including cheering, apologizing, and running with a stack of papers. The panda is sometimes highlighted in glowing green, sometimes yellow, sometimes red.

Our Panda has retained the nuclear symbol on her belly in Lauryn’s revamp (you may recall the old Fedora 404 pages that featured this glowing mark on her belly) and Lauryn has introduced a concept of the mark shifting colors here on this character sheet. How do you think we could use the different colors?

**Basic New Fedora panda character sheet:** showing a cartoon panda with large reflective eyes and a green nuclear symbol glowing on her stomach and glowing green coming from the inside of her ears. This shows her from the front and rear perspectives.

Meat^w Meet the Beefy Miracle

**The new Beefy Miracle character sheet:** Showing a happy hot dog with beady eyes and gloved/shoed stick appendages in a variety of poses, including expressing an idea with a light bulb overhead, relaxing with arms folded behind his head, and a happily splayed out standing pose with a rainbow of condiments appearing above (red ketchup, yellow mustard, green relish, purple onion.)

Here’s an updated version of the Beefy Miracle. You can see he has the same beady, twinkling eyes, and of course the mustard is still indicating progress.

**Basic new Beefy Miracle character sheet:** Showing our happy hotdog friend with a friendly wave from both the front and the rear perspective.

Meet Badger

**Basic new Badger character sheet:** The new Fedora badger design – a dark and light grey woodland creature wearing large reflective black sunglasses and a red Chewbacca-like sash, a large fluffy tail framing their comparatively skinny, tear-drop shaped body.

Here is Badger, wearing their shades.

**The new badger character sheet**: Showing the badger in a variety of poses, including proudly holding up a Fedora logo, rubbing their hands together with a large toothy grin, and sitting on the ground staring up at the sky.

Minor Characters

There are a few other minor characters in the Fedora character universe that Lauryn is also taking a look at. (More information in the ticket.)

How will these designs be used?

We want to use these awesome designs in community-focused materials to maintain a sense of fun in the Fedora community!

One initial project that is already looking to use these designs is “How Do You Fedora?” video series kicked off by another intern, Gabbie Chang. Fedora Design team member Kyle Conway has been working on designing title cards and overlays for this video series and incorporating these character designs:

If you have ideas for how you’d like to see these designs used in Fedora, reach out to the Fedora design team or drop a note here in the comments!

If you have any experience with Synfig, we are looking to potentially create animations of the characters and could use your expertise. 🙂

Meet the Designer

Hi everyone! My name is Lauryn Dake. I’m an animation major at ASU, and I’ll be working as a design team intern until the fall. I like to draw (obviously lol), as well as play chess and video games! (My favorites are Hollow Knight & Stardew Valley, because I have immaculate taste.) I’m really excited to be here! Nice to meet all of you 🙂

Comments

torbuntu says:

Not sure if it is just me, but the images aren’t showing
duffy says:

@torbuntu You have to click through to the community blog wordpress. I am not sure if Discourse is meant to carry the image refs over to it’s broadcast of wordpress posts here (would you know @mattdm?)
bt0dotninja says:

I loved the nuclear panda
mattdm says:

It carries them over but formats it wrong. It’s a bug in plugin I need to chase down. It’s easily fixed by editing the post here and adding linebreaks, but that’s kind of a pain!
mattdm says:

Also OMG I love this so much!
twohot says:

Brings back memories of Pokemon! Interesting choice or art. Quite expressive
yn1v says:

Any chance that Beefy Miracle become a Telegram sticker set? I am a fan of Beefy Miracle. But also would be nice to have Nuclear Panda also as Telegram stickers

Love the designs. Great work.
pfrields says:
These are amazing.

Here’s a thought about colors on the panda’s symbol. What if they were used for context similar to traffic signals?
- Green: Like “Go” – used to highlight good community work, point to a celebratory announcement or accomplishment, give helpful tips, direct to additional resources
- Yellow: Like “Caution” – pay attention to a potential hazard, notice a looming deadline, point out where special access or FAS group membership is required, warn against problematic language, etc.
- Red: Like “Stop” – note that something is broken, access is restricted, demonstrate an anti-pattern or no-no, highlight a critical hazard (e.g. something that could bork a system)
Also I want all these Beefy Miracle stickers!
fnux says:

Hello there! Thanks again for the hard work. Note for context that I grew up in France and am now living in German-speaking Switzerland.

tl;rd I fear that some of the choices are biased towards some localised (US?) groups and might make some people in our community uncomfortabl, which would go against our diversity/inclusivity/etc. aim.

I would not use a nuclear-ish mark on our Panda’s belly: it might not be well received by everyone. I don’t want to start a holy war here, but I can tell you that on my side of the world and with many of the groups I often interact with, nuclear power is a highly political topic. I believe we should find an alternative, as it would certainly make people uncomfortable. It would feel very very very weird to me that we do a lot of effort with inclusivity, diversity, harassment & all… and end up putting a nuclear mark on our branding!

As a second note, and to a lesser extent, the Beefy Miracle does not resonate in here. I could almost say it feels weird or US-ish to me? It might not represent the community as a whole. First time I saw it years ago during my first Fedora installation, my first reaction was along the lines of the hell is that? It's gross. Also, a growing amount of people don’t eat meat.

I believe it’s worth discussing - what do you think of the two above points?
duffy says:

Hi Timothée -

I hear you on the nuclear symbol issue, we may update to some other symbol.

Re: the Beefy Miracle, I think both sides have said all there can be said, we’ve had this discussion many times before[eg Re: Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name - users - Fedora Mailing-Lists && Re: Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name - users - Fedora Mailing-Lists ], and I am simply not willing to drop the character. I have spoken with folks whom others have spoken for as being potentially offended (vegetarians, vegans, and Hindu) who are members of the Fedora Community and they indicated they do not have any issue with the Beefy Miracle as a Fedora character. I am very supportive of putting a stop to anything that is causing or could cause harm, but could not find any evidence of that here.

~m