Character Design and Mascots

What's more fun than a mascot that represents your company, product or club in all your public communications? Below you will find a couple of case studies of fun mascots Lectrr has designed the past few years.

Belfry of Ghent

The Belfry, one of Ghents biggest tourist attractions, celebrated its 600th birthday in 2013. Besides a giant 13 meter long look and find-illustration shown in the Cloth Hall they were also in need of someone to design them a mascot.
Which character was more suited to represent the Belfry than the ancient dragon on top of its tower? Lectrr redesigned it and now it is featured everywhere in the Belfry communication. 

The Olms

Strip Turnhout, the biggest comic-convention of Flanders, was looking for a mascot to use in all of their forms of communication. Lectrr, their Artist in Residency at that moment, was asked to create this mascot. Instead of getting just a single character, the organisation was offered an entire mythical culture, a fairy tale background story and much more...

Lectrr discovered the Olms when he was looking for inspiration in the old city archives underneath the Turnhout city council. Behind an old file closet he found a hole in the wall. When he popped his head through he almost couldn't believe what he saw...
The image above is Olm City, a thriving community based deep underneath the caverns of Turnhout. Its inhabitants, the Olms, are a people of little raskals, feeding on mischief and little pranks. Is the city council missing a file? Is a road sign pointing the wrong way? You may bet it's their doing...

A new Olm was conceived for every aspect of the festival. The exhibitions got their own Olms, the information booths, the Bronzen Adhemar-award,... You name it, we've made an Olm for it. More than 40 of them saw daylight. The beauty of the Olms is the fact that each of them is very different from the next one, but they're still very recognisable. Their very basic colour palet, existing from Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black make them stand out in a multicoloured and Hi-Def world.


The Olms were used for the posters, the design of the Strip Turnhout cars, road signs, t-shirts, stickers, pins and much much more. The local library even went along in the Olms-madness and had us design a special Library Olm to use in their communnication. The tower of the Turnhout public library now has a HUGE Olm on it...

The official poster for the Strip Turnhout 2011-convention.

Typography was an important factor in the development of this project. The Olms are contemporary, but at the same time they need to be timeless. That's why we chose to use fonts that have the same characteristics. The main font in this project was Duffy Bold van ShinnType, which was used as our title font. It's a playful but very readable font, close to Lectrr's own handwriting. As a contrast for the more business-related information on the poster we decided to go with several weights of Museo Slab van Exljbris uit Arnhem. It's a great font, on it's way to become a new classic.