Mascots: Where They Came From and Why We Can't Look Away

Our idea, which stemmed from the need to create a mascot, was born back in 2022, when we launched our first website. That was likely the moment we began to be perceived as an official, trustworthy company. Since then, we’ve been invited from time to time to give interviews or take part in other media appearances. Each time, we faced the delicate challenge of presenting a profile photo – something that clearly shows there’s a real person behind the work. A perfectly normal request, but one we’ve always struggled with. We find it deeply uncomfortable to be photographed as representatives of something official – probably a remnant of an old case of imposter syndrome.

Perhaps it also stems from memories of being photographed by someone else – someone who already had an idea of what people who design something as mysterious as fonts might look like. In those moments, you find yourself holding a book with a capital letter on the cover, or, better yet, some kind of drawing tool.

Along with our collaboration with Tereza Havlínková, who took several of these photos with us, we found a more comfortable way to share news with the outside world. Perhaps we’re influenced by the way social media works, where close-ups of people’s faces are completely commonplace. Then again, it depends on who you ask – because we don’t really fit the archetype of streamers. We don’t take ourselves too seriously, nor do we turn our profession into something it isn’t, so we turned to a bit of self-parody and transformed ourselves into living mascots.

At the same time, photography – and everything that comes with it – is, of course, very time-consuming, and when you want to communicate more frequently, it quickly becomes unsustainable. So an alternative began to take shape: an official representative, a communicator, a spokesperson, if you will.

Introducing Mr. Foundry, the snail mascot we created in collaboration with Giorgia Demi. Mascots are usually characterised by irresistible cuteness, but our concept was to portray ourselves in a more humorous way. As we already said, humor becomes essential as we need to explain, our not-so-rapid approach to font development – one that is nevertheless grounded in precision. Is a snail precise in any way? We’re not sure, but it’s certainly not the fastest creature.

To make sure the communication doesn’t come across as a monologue, an integral part of Mr. Foundry is the people’s representative: Antifont. Imagine an annoying little brother who constantly asks questions and confronts you with whatever comes to mind. It may not seem like it, but he is the snail’s hidden helper – the one who ultimately helps him express himself better. His questions lead to answers, even if the snail doesn’t really feel like talking. But he’ll appreciate it later – after all, every cloud has a silver lining.

Where They Came From and Why We Can't Look Away

What cuts through the noise better than any logo, tagline, or carefully kerned wordmark? A single character. A bit crazy. Maybe even annoying. But suddenly, a brand has a pulse. This character interacts with us. It might drive us up the wall on purpose and still we remember it — because it's imperfect. It feels almost human. That's the connection a sterile icon can never make.

Mascots are emotional smugglers. They bring everything into brand territory that doesn't usually belong there — humor, absurdity, exaggeration, vulnerability. Through them, brands get permission to stumble, to laugh too loud, to be awkward. They don't need polish. They can just exist. You could say that they serve as our guides through the logo wilderness. They're storytellers who skip the guidelines and move straight onto screen — and we're captivated by every gesture, every raised eyebrow.

Where they came from

Early mascots weren't adorable. They were totems, talismans, or creatures engraved on shields. These symbols existed to protect the tribe, deliver victory, and embody collective strength. By the late 1800s, mascots found their way into sports like a revival of ancient instinct: we need something to rally around. Something that represents us, win or lose.

When the 20th century arrived, mascots realized stadiums were too limiting. They migrated to cereal boxes, billboards, and television screens. Before long, they were pitching tires (Michelin Man), candy (M&Ms), chips (Pringles), and fried chicken — sometimes as humans themselves (Colonel Sanders, KFC).

In the late 1970s, illustrator André Roche pioneered airbrush techniques that gave cartoon mascots an unusual sense of depth and presence, anticipating the visual language that would later become standard with digital colourisation and 3D modelling.

His work for Ferrero, including the “Happy Hippos” and subsequent spin-offs, helped turn mascots into expandable character universes, that circulate across products, campaigns, and markets. This was not just stylistic innovation, but mascots were becoming more immersive and persistent. They were no longer static symbols, but scalable narrative systems capable of spanning media, products, and generations as psychological hooks. 

But that's when they started to become too powerful. The thing is – your brain is embarrassingly easy to trick. Slap a face on literally anything and suddenly your amygdala lights up like it just ran into an old friend. It's called anthropomorphism, and it's why you feel weirdly attached to a cartoon tiger selling you sugar for breakfast. You don't even know it's happening. Your conscious brain thinks it's in charge – but it is not. Here are some examples of the most manipulative mascots.

Joe Camel was the one that got banned. This guy was so effective he became illegal. Kids aged 3–6 recognized Joe Camel better than Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and Barbie. A cartoon camel selling cigarettes to toddlers. By 1991, high schoolers recognized him better than most adults did — and Camel's market share among young smokers shot up accordingly. He was eventually dragged off shelves in 1997 for good. Kids were the victims here too.

Tony the Tiger was essentially a hype mascot for childhood obesity, wrapping sugar bombs in a cool athletic character so kids would lose their minds in the cereal aisle. Chile got so fed up they outright banned him from cereal boxes. Lidl quietly dropped their mascots in the UK too, specifically to stop kids from weaponizing the "pester power" technique on their parents. The same problem applied to the original party animal — Spuds MacKenzie. Bud Light's bull terrier mascot was the life of every late-80s party — until people noticed he might be making beer look really appealing to an underage audience that legally couldn't drink it.

So what's actually going on? Mexico tried to ban mascots from products with health warning labels, the food industry fought tooth and nail to keep them. Kellogg's literally reformulated a product just to dodge the warning label — and keep mascots like Toucan Sam on the box. They're not just cute branding. They're psychological real estate — living rent-free in your head since childhood, making you trust products you've never critically thought about for a single second. Which is terrifying, right?

But let's dig a little deeper.

Back in 1943, ethologist Konrad Lorenz figured out something that advertisers would later exploit to death. He proposed "Kindchenschema" – or baby schema – a set of infantile physical features like a large head, round face, and big eyes that instinctively motivates caretaking behavior in humans, with the evolutionary function of helping offspring survive. The ultimate checklist of "cute" features includes a large head relative to body size, a rounded protruding forehead, large eyes positioned below the midline of the face, rounded protruding cheeks, a rounded body shape, soft elastic surfaces, and elastic movements. Now look at literally any brand mascot. They're all doing it. Every single one. Brain scans show that baby schema activates a key structure in the brain's reward system — essentially triggering the same neurological response as receiving a gift or anticipating pleasure. Marketers didn't invent this. They just weaponized it.

Hello Kitty's creator realized early on that by using a simple, emotionally neutral character – famously with no mouth – they could create an icon onto which people would project their own feelings. Hello Kitty's success demonstrated that cuteness could be systematically merchandised, turning an ordinary white cat into a multibillion-dollar empire. No mouth. No opinions.

Kawaii aesthetics and cute mascots succeed as cultural ambassadors and marketing tools precisely because they seem genuinely innocent rather than calculated from the beginning — bypassing rational resistance by appealing directly to emotion. Every rounded corner, every oversized eye, every wobbling walk is a deliberate signal fired straight into your prehistoric parenting brain. You're not charmed. You're triggered. And someone is making a lot of money off the difference. Cute is not neutral. It never was.

Political Mascots — When Animals Run for Office

Here's where it gets genuinely weird. The same psychological levers – recognizable, emotionally resonant – have been used to manipulate entire electorates for over 150 years. The donkey and the elephant have long represented the Democratic and Republican Parties. But neither party chose them. Both symbols grew out of insults and political cartoons. Political mascots aren't just supposed to be memorable. They're doing heavy ideological lifting. An elephant projects power, memory, stability — imperial vibes. A donkey projects stubbornness, working-class grit, salt-of-the-earth energy. Every time you see these animals, you're receiving a subtle emotional brief about what each party wants you to feel about them. No policy required.

Both symbols were popularized by one cartoonist — Thomas Nast. It's a little strange that both parties embraced their mascots so enthusiastically, considering how poorly the two animals come across in Nast's original cartoons: stupid, pliable, easily confused. Maybe neither party bothered to check before stocking up on pins and tote bags. The original insult became the brand identity. That's like  Stockholm Syndrome as merchandise.

In a Hard Uniform

The military figured out the mascot game early. In formal ceremonies, parades, and daily routines, mascots participate actively – marching alongside troops or leading events – which instills discipline and fosters emotional attachment among personnel. In other words: a goat in a regimental uniform isn't there because soldiers like goats. It's there to manufacture belonging, loyalty, and shared identity. It's a Kindchenschema in full military dress.

Winnie the bear was the mascot for the Canadian Army Veterinary Corps during World War I. After the war, she was kept at London Zoo — where she inspired A.A. Milne's son named his stuffed bear "Winnie," and that is how Winnie-the-Pooh was created.

Stubby was a Boston Terrier who became the mascot for the American 102nd Infantry during World War I, trained to warn his unit of upcoming mustard gas and shelling, and able to locate wounded soldiers stranded in no-man's land. Then there's Patron, another loyal friend,  a Jack Russell Terrier and Ukraine's bomb-sniffing dog. Patron became famous following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and has since become a symbol of wartime resilience, receiving honorary awards including the Order for Courage from President Zelenskyy — and winning the Palm Dog Award at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

Olympic & Sports Mascots

The Olympics turned the mascot into an instrument of state-level propaganda. In 1980, sixty nations boycotted the Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The USSR had a catastrophic image problem and needed a way through. What they landed on was a bear named Misha.

The bear as a symbol of Russia predates the Cold War by centuries — one of its earliest recorded uses comes from Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4, where he referred to a "rugged Russian bear." But Misha took it further. Round, friendly, and completely silent on the subject of Afghanistan, he became the first mascot in sporting history to achieve large-scale commercial success — selling plush toys and pins to a world that was, in theory, supposed to be looking the other way.

Sam the Eagle — America Says It Back (1984)

Sam the Olympic Eagle has a pretty similar story. Created by Disney artist C. Robert Moore, Sam arrived at the Los Angeles games as a direct counterpart to Misha — though nobody officially said so. Some people found his name and appearance an appropriate expression of the strong nationalistic flavour of the 1984 games, given the Soviet-led boycott in retaliation for the American-led boycott four years prior. Others found the first and only blatantly political Olympic mascot objectionable for a supposedly apolitical event. Round and round it goes. 

Misha and Eagle Sam were both adapted into animated series, not in their native countries but in Japan. The link with Japan’s use of kawaii in its contemporary culture is immediate, and the country has shown itself capable of reworking even Olympic mascots in this key. Born in strongly national contexts, they have their political and symbolic origins softened through an aesthetic of tenderness and a narrative that is accessible to a child audience to become distributed cultural products. While the case of Eagle Sam, despite its 51 episodes, never managed to circulate beyond Japan and remained confined to a domestic audience, Misha the Bear Cub achieved a much wider international distribution. Everything is not so different from the classic children’s story narratives we are used to, except for episode 18. In this episode, Misha encounters Kunta-kun, the mascot of Hokkaido Television Broadcasting at the time, and they end up fighting, which can be interpreted as an explicit symbolic resonance of historical tensions between Russia and Japan.

Ciao!

Most World Cup mascots follow the same script. Round face. Dopey grin. Soft enough to sell as a plush toy. A safe, forgettable creature designed by committee to offend nobody and charm everybody for approximately three weeks. In October 1985, Italy's organising committee announced a competition to design a mascot for the 1990 World Cup. Over 50,000 entries arrived — most of them predictably leaning on pizza, pasta, and ancient Roman glory. Among them was a submission from a self-taught graphic designer named Lucio Boscardin, who came up with his idea while sitting at a traffic light.

"It made me understand that the Italian flag was an element to be valued," Boscardin later recalled. "I made some simple sketches in my car right there and, in my study, I broke the word 'ITALIA' into ten tricolor sticks so that they would become an athlete. Only the head was missing and, inevitably, I put a ball."

The result was unlike anything that had come before or has come since. While most World Cups opted for a nice, cuddly mascot that could be easily sold as a soft toy, Italy chose a stick figure that looked like a disassembled Rubik's Cube. No Kindchenschema. No baby schema. Ciao was futuristic in its angular, gender-neutral depiction of a footballer — and remains a timeless piece of design to this day. It was singled out for its subtle nod to Italian identity through its colour scheme rather than leaning on the country's obvious Roman past or fondness for pizza and pasta.

What makes Ciao genuinely interesting in the context of everything we've been talking about is precisely what it refused to do. It didn't try to charm you. It was just an idea — clean, smart, and completely confident in itself. A mascot that succeeded not by bypassing your rational brain, but by actually engaging it.

The Simpsons: The Mascot That Ate Itself

This is where all the threads tie together — because The Simpsons isn't just a TV show anymore. It's a cautionary tale about what happens when a mascot outlives the thing it was supposed to represent.

Beginning in season eight and accelerating in subsequent years, the series shed its best qualities, tampering with the foundations of its own universe and becoming so self-referential that characters who once functioned as broad cultural archetypes became exaggerated self-parodies. The phrase "Zombie Simpsons" aptly describes what it has ultimately become: a free-floating commercial property that exists solely to wring continued profits from an undead object. It's a truth we have to accept — the show doesn't make merch anymore. It lives from it.

The trap is this: Homer, Bart, Lisa, and Marge started as actual characters — satirical archetypes that meant something. They became mascots for their own show. And then the mascots became more valuable than the show itself. The Simpsons was once seen as an expression of anti-authority that challenged every convention of prime time TV — counterculture, shining a spotlight on every wart of American society. Now Bart's yellow face appears on H&M t-shirts for people who have never watched a single episode. The character has fully detached from the story. The mascot “won” over the  show.

This is the endgame of mascot logic: the image becomes so profitable that it no longer needs to be attached to anything true. It just needs to be recognizable. And recognizable, it turns out, is enough.

Which brings us back to the beginning. From a cartoon camel selling cigarettes to toddlers, to a Soviet bear laundering Cold War politics — every mascot is a deal. You get something cute and familiar. They get direct access to the part of your brain that doesn't ask questions. The real question isn't whether mascots manipulate you. They do. The question is whether you'd have it any other way.