Cause for celebration
At Asana, we don’t believe in all work and no play. We help teams find joy in the process and delight in their progress. From tiny tasks to major milestones, we love celebrating teams’ accomplishments with the help of (mostly) mystical creatures, including a unicorn, yeti, narwhal, phoenix, and otter.
Over a decade ago, an engineer at Asana introduced a unicorn as an April Fool’s joke. Users immediately fell in love with the creature and its whimsical rainbow trail. Asana recognized the significance of infusing moments of surprise and delight into work and gradually added new teammates to join in on the task-completion fun. By prioritizing these experiences in the product, Asana creates lasting connections with users to build a magically loyal customer base.
Behind the magic
While celebration creatures help us recognize a job well done, they also serve as brand assets that help people recognize Asana in the wild. Over the years, there became several iterations of these creatures. We wanted to ensure they were not only consistent, but also reflected the Asana brand today and in the future.
While an exciting endeavor, character design refreshes must be handled with care. They often keep the essence of the character, but stylistically evolve to stay relevant (much like that famous mouse). Asana’s celebrations are the same creatures we know and love, but with slight upgrades to evolve with Asana’s brand expression. As we iterated on the character designs, we wanted to ensure we kept not just their recognition, but also their personalities.
We ultimately landed on something that felt fresh but familiar — like a coworker who returns from a break with a post-vacation glow and renewed sense of ambition. ✨
Reintroducing the team
- 🦄 Unicorn: The leader and dreamer. Serious about celebration. Adventurer.
- 🦦 Otter: Very competitive. High EQ and IQ. Likes seeing work flow.
- 🌊 Narwhal: Makes a splash. Always keeps it real. Ships results.
- 🧊 Yeti: Cold at first, but sweet. Enjoys the outdoors. Hides behind completed tasks.
- 🔥 Phoenix: Not scared of a little heat. The ultimate planner. Action-oriented.
To see the unicorn and his teammates, enable celebrations from the Display tab of My Profile Settings.
Gift of gratitude
With the evolution of celebration creatures came the opportunity to reevaluate our appreciation stickers (you know, the animated reactions in the comment section). After all, work contains multitudes of emotions, and we wanted to give our users additional ways to appreciate others within Asana beyond just celebration. So we asked our most passionate users: the community Ambassadors.
They shared amazing ideas, like high fives, hugs, and rainbows. We made sure to keep a version of the most-used appreciation stickers in Asana and replaced the least-used with ideas from our employees and community. Appreciations by the people, for the people.
We’ve had so much fun giving our beloved celebration creatures and appreciation stickers a glow-up; we hope you love them as much as we do. Huge thank you to Stout Design and the many folks at Asana across Brand Creative, Product, Engineering, Marketing, User Operations, and our Community Ambassadors for making this happen. May you always find joy and delight in every goal you accomplish. 🌈🦄❤️
Follow the Asana Design Team: asana.design | Instagram | Dribbble
