PERSONA // INTERNAL TEAM MASCOT + MERCHANDISE DESIGN
TIMELINE
June - July 2026
ROLE
Designer
TEAM
1 Designer (me),
2 Brand Design Advisors
TOOLS
Procreate,
Adobe CC
CONTEXT
Persona is a platform that handles identity verification and that is very technically complex. At first glance, the product is very intimidating. But the people that build this product are all very down-to-earth, creative, and friendly. The culture here is very playful, and that's something that we wanted to spotlight to the company internally.
Starting from the very early days of this company, people had informally created mascots for each of the teams here. Over the years, the certain people in the design team had drawn these mascots. This process was rather unintentional, and consequently unstandardized.
In December 2025, the brand design team started an initiative to formalize the internal brand identity. Part of this initiative was revamping all the mascots to have a coherent style while thoroughly expressing the internal team culture.
GOALS
The "Documents Team" was the team I interned on from August - December 2025. Their original mascot was a mitochondria, but in December 2025, the team voiced that they wanted to change their mascot to a juice box. Creating this new mascot was one of the first things I wanted to when I returned as an intern in May 2026. Alongside that, the team voiced also wanting to have unique team merchandise that wasn't very obviously "company merchandise". The explicit goals are broken down below.
MASCOT:
Accurately represent a juicebox.
Showcase expression and character through a static illustration.
Follow the style already established by the brand team for the existing mascots.
MERCHANDISE:
Represent the Documents team.
Represent the internal Persona company culture.
Incorporate the mascot.
Be discreet company merchandise.
(Specific additional request from the team) Look like streetwear.
MASCOT WORK
Below are the existing mascots illustrated by other members of the design team.
For this new mascot, I started off just roughly sketching variants of juice boxes in this art style. I made sure to maintain the stylized faces (eg. included a nose since the face is quite long), the mitten-like hands, and the geometric legs and feet. Alongside that though, there were a lot of factors that were modifiable and that had to be considered. Should the straw be bent? Should the juice box be in movement? Do we want to show 3-dimensionality in this illustration?
Initial sketches
Refined illustrations
Finalizing on a design was more difficult than expected! A notable challenge was trying to present 3-dimensionality while maintaining the existing style. In the sketches here (see above, left), I initially tried to show the 3-dimensionality in a very realistic way through an explicit rectangular prism. But because the rest of the mascots don't really show dimension, these sketches looked very out of place. I then tried to remove the dimensionality completely, but then that resulted in a very simple rectangle that barely looked like a juice box.
After looking at some other illustrations for inspiration, I came up with more refined illustrations to solve the aforementioned problems (see above, right).
With some more slight tweaks, the mascot design was finalized and is showcased on the right. (Click to enlarge)
Final mascot design
MERCHANDISE WORK
Taking inspiration from popular streetwear designs, these are the initial sketches I came up with. They all share the same front design (first photo), but there were three unique back designs that I was working with. The plan was to use a single colour (just Persona's main purple accent) and have the design be printed on black and white tshirts. The intention here was to mimic screen printing, which is something seen in many streetwear designs.
FRONT DESIGN:
Immediately here, I wanted to start thinking about the idea of how I could represent both the team and the company in a discreet way. Knowing that the Persona logo was essentially just an underlined asterisk, I thought that replacing the asterisk with the team mascot would be a very easy way to get that idea across. I simplified the juice box mascot into a very simple juice box graphic and added an underline to it as a nudge towards the Persona logo.
BACK DESIGN (1):
Stamp collections and graphics is a theme I've seen in some streetwear clothing. I wanted to play with that idea, but by making a collage of symbols that somehow all relate to the Documents team. At a glance, this may just seem like a collection of unrelated items, but everything has some type of backstory, meaning, or inside joke related to the team. I did this to, once again, try to represent the team and company in a very discreet way. I wanted the whole design to have a feeling of "if you know, you know" to seem more personalized and special, instead of just being generic company merchandise.
I played with the specific idea of stamps, because I like how organic and imperfect a lot of stamps are shaped. Especially when they're hand-crafted, there are a lot of uneven spaces and gaps. I wanted to mimic that in my design with intentional imperfections to showcase more the Persona company culture.
I also initially added the word "Documents" in Japanese katakana, getting inspiration once again from popular streetwear designs. I ultimately changed this to just say "San Francisco" to be a bit more personalized to the company (as it is based in San Francisco).
BACK DESIGN (2) + (3):
These last two designs were more so just illustrative work to showcase the mascot of the team.
Ultimately, we moved forward with the front design on all the shirts, and designs (1) and (2). The polished designs are presented below: (Click to enlarge)
IMPACT
Both the mascot and clothing designs were very well received by both the team and the rest of the company. The mascot was even featured on a celebratory cake that we had gotten after one of our big product launches (see right). My initiative of creating this new mascot had led to a lot more new teams requesting mascots for themselves as well.
The Documents team is made up of 10 people (including myself), and 35 individual items of clothing were ordered. Because this was intended to be internal team merchandise, orders were restricted to only members of the team. However, many other people in the office voiced liking the designs, and wanting this apparel too! Seeing people wear my designs in the office makes all the effort worth it :)
