Brand • Character Design
The Zello Fellow
The Zello Fellow is a company mascot I created from Zello’s own push-to-talk identity - an anthropomorphized version of the mic icon at the heart of the app. I originated it, designed every version, and grew it from a self-funded sticker run into a system that runs through Zello’s culture, its product, and how the company recognizes its people.
Every company needs a little guy
Into the product and the culture
The Zello Fellow made it into the product itself, as the face of Echo - the contact every new Zello user talks to when they test their mic. Something I sketched on a whiteboard now greets everyone who opens the app. Inside the company, it's also how we recognize each other: a set of trophies for our company values, plus an MVP award we hand out every year.
the very first whiteboard sketch!
Getting it made (the scrappy part)
Nobody wanted to fund it at first - Ops wouldn't spend budget on stickers of a microphone with a face, so our design team paid for the first run out of our own budget to prove it would work. It did. The stickers turned up on laptops and water bottles, people kept asking for more, and that grassroots pull won the budget to grow it into everything above.