Dream team Drawing

Simon Oxley. () Designer of graphics and muppet mascots. Most notably the designer of the original bird, Octocat for Github, Bitly fish, Turntable.fm mascots, design and the logo. extract from Pandodaily article: Simon Oxley is the sort of fellow who makes dry jokes so subtle that Americans will miss them. He's not a developer, techie, or household name in Silicon Valley. He's a humble British bloke with a peaceful life in his house in the Oxford countryside, with his Japanese wife and two young sons. In fact, the only thing that hints at his significance in the startup world comes in the form of a few wooden birds, spray painted black and hanging on the walls. Oxley designed the original Twitter bird in 2006 - an elegant, simple creature that decorated the early days of the site. It has since lost the spotlight to the newer cartoon version. Oxley didn't discover his design fame until he was watching CNN in the living room one day. "Suddenly, an anchor was standing in front of a screen with the twitter bird really big on it," Oxley recollects. "I called my wife into the room and said, "˜Look at that! CNN's got my bird!'" Oxley soon started getting calls from media outlets like Wired and the Washington Post, who did profiles on the unwitting social media designer. Twitter also used a couple Oxley iStocks for the error screens (but "not the Fail Whale!"). He says he also designed the robot with a missing arm and ice-cream chatting with a caterpillar. "He never made a big deal out if it, in his usual shrug-it-off, down to earth way," remembers Oxley's friend, Reuben Miller. "That made me even more impressed, because there is nothing more refreshing than celebrity or talent that doesn't put on airs." His bird was inspired by Japanese aesthetics, with simple, complementing angles and curves. I asked Oxley whether he deliberately made his bird look happy. He says he can't remember too well "” after all, to make his living on iStockPhoto, where he'd earn barely enough for a drink off each image, he had to produce graphics "like a sausage factory." He estimates he spent 30 minutes on the original Twitter bird. "It's not like, "˜Right "” today I'm going to go draw a bird and spend a day on it!'" Oxley says smiling. Companies can't use images they purchase on iStock for their official logo, and as Twitter grew larger they introduced the now familiar cartoonish bird, which eventually overshadowed Oxley's version.