Why SafeStack has ninjas and unicorns
Things have been wild here at SafeStack. Love is in the air, the team is hammering away at tools to make security easy for time starved organizations, and we’ve just released a red panda into the wild.
But we had to make time to write this blogpost. Because it’s a subject that’s dear to our hearts.
Safestack is an IT security consultancy, which puts us right in the middle of Serious Business territory. So why is our monitoring product Dfend represented by a masked ninja and rainbow-maned unicorn, while our e-learning series is presented by a red panda?
Stick with me please. There’s a method to this madness.
See, at SafeStack, we want to be excellent to one other. We believe that everyone deserves the right to be safe, regardless of gender, background or personality. Discrimination of any form is unacceptable — It hurts people, and discourages talented individuals with the potential to make a positive impact in our world. That’s a loss for everyone because, after all, we are all in this together.
We try to include this principle in everything we do. For our material, this means starting from day one, with our design process.
The danger of using human forms
We find stories and patterns even in sparse data…Our minds tend to fill in bits of information with stereotypes and generalizations based on our background and history.
Studies out there show that we tend to remember stuff better when it is presented with information that we can relate to, even if this information isn’t the main subject focus.
So it would make more sense to have human characters, right? People who look like us?
Nope. Thing is, we pay more attention when we identify with the person presenting or illustrating information, so if I don’t see someone who resembles me (in my case, a tiny Asian Chinese woman), there’s a huge danger that I’ll subconsciously think, “This doesn’t look like me. It probably doesn’t apply to me. Let’s just ignore it”.
Not good.
Security works best when we all work together, so it was important to us that our characters didn’t resonate with some of our community and alienate others. That’s why we chose animal mascots (and a masked, anonymous ninja) for Dfend and OnDemand.
So, animals. But that’s not all.
It’s usually pretty easy to tell whether a cartoon animal is male or female, right? The girls have huge eyelashes, lipstick, a skirt and spotty bow, and the boy characters have…none of these. It’s a visual shorthand we’ve all been exposed to many times that we’ve come to recognize on sight.
We didn’t want our characters to have obvious gender markers. But that’s a bit trickier than taking away the spotty bow. We’re all well trained to see cartoon animals as male by default, so our main characters were carefully designed to not have obviously gendered clothes or gestures. They even have unisex names — the ninja, if you were wondering, is named Robin. It means thinking about the animals we chose, too. Red pandas like Riley are not sexually dimorphic, which in plain English basically means that you can’t tell male and female red pandas apart by their appearance.
Fun fact: Red pandas are so difficult to tell apart by sight that researchers of wild populations have been known to DNA test their poop to determine the proportion of females to males in the population! Want more red panda facts?
We believe that security should be accessible to anyone. Our characters are varied and painted in vivid colours, embracing the wonderful diversity of our team and our community, and trying to make the usually dark and scary Serious Business world of security inviting, encouraging and maybe even fun.
And so, the rainbow unicorn and happy red panda were born.
We want to celebrate harmonious diversity. Would you like to join us?
P.S: We can talk through strategies to expand our course material or align our training more closely with your brand so you get the best of both worlds. Contact us. We can help.
