Pal

Cloudinary's unofficial mascot used to be a unicorn, from its startup days. But Cloudinary isn't a startup anymore, so the unicorn sent the wrong message, and leadership asked for something new. I came up with Pal.

Pal comes from our pixel theme. Like an Olympic mascot, each Pal carries the company's principles. There are six, one for each part of the platform: Pixel, Enrich, Guidance, Transformation, Delivery and Orchestration.

Pal is just for us: internal materials and community collateral, to build morale and have some fun. The Pals also act as brand ambassadors in our AI brand portal, where they make the experience feel more human.

One body, many faces

Every Pal is built from the same simple parts: a square body, legs and feet, and a full set of faces — happy, curious, amazed, love and suspicious. Each Pal has its own color, so you can tell them apart at a glance.

A square that comes alive

Pal grows out of the same pixel idea as our brand. Each Pal is a simple square that stands up, walks and runs, then folds back into a square to show what its product does. Enrich scans across its body; Delivery dashes off.

Every motion storyboarded

I storyboarded each animation: the walk and run cycles, standing up, and each product's moment.

Pals in the portal

In our AI brand portal, the Pals are your guides. Ask for a slide deck and the request moves down the pipeline, with a different Pal at each step: reading your brief, pulling in messaging and claims, applying the design system, assembling the content and running the brand check, until the result is saved to Cloudinary Assets.

Off screen

The Pals made it off screen too, as keychain merch for our team and community.