The Pipetocats

I/Sentry had the good fortune to be the first real partner post in the history of the GitHub blog. We were also given the honor of making an octocat that would be featured in the post. While a very small list of non-GitHub folks made octocats that are considered “official”, this is the first time a partner has been allowed to do one.

The Octocat is supposed to widely relatable to the viewer as “this is me when I use GitHub”, so I wanted to avoid mashing our brand into the graphic in a smarmy, opportunistic way. I focused on a metaphor that fits well into the world of error tracking and collaboration, the colloquialism of “fighting fires”. Instead of slapping our logo on the graphic like I saw many companies do in my time at GitHub, I used the Sentry purple/orange color palette for the fire fighter uniforms, which I thought looked pretty sharp, and was frankly already pretty close to a classic dark colored uniform anyway.

The illustration style has improved greatly in the years since I last made an octocat. To prove to myself I haven’t become completely irrelevant I decided I’d do this one in the new style. It was much more challenging than the static style of my era, but with some generous help from the Octocat artists themselves on the pose, I was able to get something that I think is fairly true to the real thing. It was a great deal of fun to work on it and I’m happy to have had the chance to do so.

If you're curious about the history of the Octocat, and why my capitalization of the word seems incoherent, I've written extensively about it here: http://cameronmcefee.com/work/the-octocat/