Queequeg the Quadra Quoll

June 26, 2020

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It's a proven fact that all software companies require a cuddly cartoon mascot to be properly respected in the marketplace. Sure, we all innately know this, but for some reason I forgot to act on it until recently. Late last year I began thinking of what would make a good Quadra mascot and I landed on the spotted Australian Quoll.

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The beloved(?) corporate mascot Clippy loves Comic Sans MS!

Is it because the quoll embodies all those things that make up Quadra? I suppose, quolls might manage risk, generate insurance documents, and perform cost allocation, but that’s not why the quoll was chosen. Nope, it was plain and simple alliteration, because alliterative awesomeness always awakens admiration! So Queequeg the Quadra Quoll was born. Also, the spotted quoll provides a good opportunity to pickup Quadra’s block logo in the beast’s fur?

My first iteration of Quequeeg was done during one of my many crayon drawing sessions while Will played in the basement. It started with good intentions but wound up looking like some kind of creepy Furry fan art. Definitely not a good thing for a software mascot.

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I need an adult! That's one creepy quoll!

The second go round I tried to limit the human-like qualities by shortening the arms and making the head a bit bigger, this too was a basement crayon drawing because that's how I operate. It was grabbed and crumpled by unknown parties, but I managed to flatten it out and scan it nonetheless.

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Creepy quoll quotient quelled?

Having him on all fours was definitely less creepy, but it didn’t really work since he needed to stand up and do mascot things like tell you a webpage is not found or an error has happened (you know, the usual tech mascot spiel). Since I was pretty happy with his overall look I hopped into Clip Studio and sketched some orthographic views of Queequeq so I could get a feel for his body from different angles while standing.

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Quoll character sheet

At this point I wanted to try out color, so I used an actual quoll to grab some flat colors and digitally inked + colored my orthographic views.

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Quequeeg looking very Disney-esque

Taking one of the colored orthographic views I did a quick mockup in photoshop, I found his brown tinge to be a bit off-putting on an actual Quadra page so I shifted his color to more blue, why not?

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It’s true, I’m likely responsible for broken Quadra code :-(

Ok, that's a good start to the Queequeg saga, in the next installment I’ll dive into creating quoll images for various web error pages, the Queequeg bio, the works!

Owen Soule

Published June 26, 2020