Druplicon

Dries Buytaert named Drupal after druppel, Dutch for drop, and in September 2001 Kristjan Jansen noticed that two drops laid sideways make an infinity symbol, and that an infinity symbol sitting in a circle reads as a pair of eyes. Steven Wittens, who signs his work UnConeD, took that observation and built the face around it: the eyes, the little curved nose, the wide grin. He rendered it in 3D in 2004 and that glossy version became the one everyone knows. Because it ships under the GPL, the community treated it as raw material rather than a brand asset. There is a whole site, druplicon.org, catalogueing more than two hundred variants indexed by camp, country and costume. At DrupalCon it exists physically as a twelve foot inflatable that has to be deflated by a man in a dress shirt on the last afternoon, which is probably the most honest photograph of a mascot anywhere in this atlas.