Preface: “Why the change in Mascot? We loved Andy Bugdroid!”

A lot of people love Andy, our former skateboarding mascot. This was clearly evident with the polarized reviews to our announcement of selecting Caio’s prototype. We love Andy too, he has served us faithfully for close to 3 years now. However, he increasingly became a symbol of what CyanogenMod was when Steve (Cyanogen) started it, a ‘playful spin’ on AOSP, and reflective of our immaturity as a project.

We believe we’re more than just “stock Android for a zillion devices”, and we felt the need for a distinct identity; a change was needed.

This change would allow us to have a unique representative, one not reliant on Google’s mascot creation. Contrary to popular belief, both Andy and his penchant for skateboarding were Google’s design – we added the color and arrow under Creative Commons licensing, but it’s still a very slight variation of Google’s own bugdroid, as seen here. As much as we’d like to say it was ‘original’ it really wasn’t; its iconic status was achieved through the merits of CyanogenMod and our community of contributors, not as an epicly designed mascot.

This new mascot will be unique for CyanogenMod and provide an identity and attitude by which the project can continue to develop – a mature Android OS.

Inspiration for design:

We’ll let Caio speak for himself on this one:

“When I first started working on the new mascot I had this vision of making something that could also work as a polished and modern logo. I came up with two humanoid figures whose bodies took inspiration from heroes action figures and resembles the original Android robot. For the heads I started with two ideas: a power socket and a simplistic round head. I wanted CM’s own robot to feel like an evolution of what we had before, giving it its unique look – and it’s a huge challenge to try to evolve something people know and love.

The idea here was to create something cute (people love cute), modern and extremely flexible. Something simple yet iconic; so we could do thousands of different things with it. I wanted the mascot to look great everywhere in every size and color.

For colors I decided to keep the most obvious choice, which was keeping the cyan and grey from our Andy.”

Modifications:

As you can see, compared to the prototypes selected, some modifications have been made. Cid has ‘grown up’ from the child like form of the original design. Additionally, his head has taken traits from both prototypes, not quite a square block and not quite perfectly round.

While the wrench-like hands were unique, we felt trying to pitch them as ‘tweaking Android’ was a stretch, and went with the more subtle rounded hands. This allows for a cleaner look in many different forms, colors and applications.

Cid’s eyes were made wider, to allow for expressions to be conveyed, and a mouth was added to enhance this capability. The ears were added as an homage to the much loved Andy.

Caio’s opinion of the changes:

“When reviewing the design I felt the need for some distinctive features and we decided to give him some attitude and the ability to convey different emotions. Cid has big eyes and his default form rocks a challenging look — something the CM community is all about.”

And we think it looks great!

Cid (Pronounced: /si:d/):

When we started brainstorming names we wanted to pick something short, simple and fitting for the new mascot. Obviously trying to stray away from the *droid or *Andy type names we decided to pay homage to D.A.R.Y.L., B.O.B Maximillion or V.I.N.Cent and create a name that could also be an acronym.

We chose C.I.D. which is short for Cyanogenmod ID, the common thread that all CyanogenMod users share; each user’s unique place in our community.

Some of you may also be familiar with the concept of the “id”, the instinctual driving force behind our personalities. It seemed fitting, that this chaotic force and need for immediate gratification, was incorporated into the image of a OS which strives to be on the bleeding edge of Android development.

Thus C.I.D became Cid.