Alright, let’s talk about those Trailblazer mascots. You know, the ones you see floating around the Salesforce community stuff. Astro, Codey, Einstein, all those critters. I bumped into them quite a bit during a project I was messing with.
Getting Inspired by the Crew
So, I was working on building out a small internal knowledge base for my team. Just a simple thing, really. But staring at plain text pages felt kinda dull. I remembered seeing those mascots – they always seemed pretty friendly and approachable. Made the whole tech thing feel less… intimidating? Yeah, that’s the word.
I thought, hey, maybe I could whip up something similar, just a simple character to sprinkle around our little site. Not trying to rip anything off, obviously, just capture that same sort of helpful, positive vibe. Sounded easy enough at first.
Fired up some basic drawing software I had lying around. Didn’t really have fancy tools or anything. Just started doodling. My first few tries? Total garbage. Seriously. One looked like a lumpy potato with antennae. Another just seemed… sad. Not exactly the cheerful vibe I was going for.
It took me a couple of evenings, just sketching and erasing, sketching and erasing. Here’s what the process kinda looked like:
- Tried thinking about what our team does. We solve problems, right? So maybe something like a helpful bot?
- Sketched out loads of different body shapes. Round ones, square ones, some abstract blobs.
- Played with adding simple features – big eyes usually make things look friendlier, I figured. Maybe a little tool belt or a lightbulb idea graphic?
- Color was another thing. Tried a few palettes. Wanted something that popped but wasn’t too distracting on the page.
Man, making something look effortlessly simple is way harder than it looks. You see characters like Astro and think “Oh, that’s cute and simple,” but getting that balance right? Tough stuff. Especially when you’re not exactly an artist, like me.
Eventually, after a lot of trial and error, I landed on this little robot dude. Kind of minimalist, holding a little wrench. Gave him big, curious eyes and a slightly optimistic tilt to his head. No name, just ‘Helper Bot’ for the site.
I dropped the little guy onto a few pages of our knowledge base, like the FAQ section and the ‘Getting Started’ guide. Didn’t make a huge announcement or anything. But slowly, people started noticing. Got a few comments like “Hey, who’s this little robot?” or “He actually makes this page less boring.”
It wasn’t a masterpiece, not by a long shot. But it did the trick. Made our little internal site feel a bit more custom, a bit more ours. And honestly, it was just fun to go through that creative process, even if the result was just a simple little bot inspired by those slicker Trailblazer mascots. Sometimes these small personal projects are the most satisfying, you know?
