The mascot is the gate itself, and its name is Penny

Decision record 0030

Amended by 0038: the header is a wide quay scene with Penny mid-channel, and the wordmark is painted on the quay wall, drawn as paths. Penny, her name and the colours stay as they are here.

The dashboard gets a mascot header (map, 0029). Three directions were drawn as rough animated SVGs and judged in a local page that mimics a GitHub issue and in real issues in the private lab repo, in light and dark: an otter who works the gate, the gate itself with a face, and a crowd of water drops queueing at a gate.

The gate with a face won. It is one bold shape that reads at any size, so the same drawing is the mascot, the logo and the icon. It carries the wordmark next to it, so the header is also the brand line of the issue. Its moods are small changes to one shape, which keeps the files tiny and the set consistent. And the plain header (0031) is simply the same gate with its face off, where the other two directions had to remove their hero and leave an empty scene.

The otter had the most charm but needs an illustrator to look good and is small inside a 440 wide header. The drops were funny as a crowd but have no single face to put on a logo.

The name is Penny, short for penstock, a real word for a sluice gate. The name is for docs, the readme and talking about the mascot. It never appears on the dashboard.

The colours are teal water and a copper gate, called verdigris while choosing. Blue water and a timber gate was rejected because the blue is GitHub’s own link and accent colour and the header blended into the page. A grey gate where water is the only colour was rejected as the least fun, and its lively states barely differed from the plain one.

Consequences

• Penny is a sluice gate seen from the front: two posts, a crossbeam with a hand wheel, and a panel of planks with two eyes and a mouth. A stream runs from the gate under the wordmark across the header. The wordmark is sluiceway in lower case.
• The colour pair, light then dark: water #4ac6b7 and #2fb5a5, deep water #0f8f83 and #178f82, foam #d6f5f0 and #a8ebe2, gate #c4673a and #e08a5c, plank lines #8f4424 and #a85d38, frame #5f6b6b and #8d96a0. Ink and ground follow GitHub’s own greys for each theme.
• The signal colours are GitHub’s own in both themes and are not part of the brand: amber for the level gauge, red for the failure lamp, green for plants. A reader already knows what they mean on this page.
• The files in assets/mascot/ are concept art: rough on purpose, and good enough to build and test the header against. Final art may redraw every shape but keeps the character, the colour pair, the states (0031) and the file rules (0033).
• The other two directions and the other palettes are kept out of this repo. They live with the prototype on the prototype/mascot branch of the private lab repo.