About this project

This one deviates quite a bit from the “norm” of the other projects on this site.

As we developed BCI Buddy further (see bci-buddy.com or BCI Buddy: An educational BCI Kit), we needed a mascot to properly convey our theme and child-friendly nature.

Deciding on an octopus

After brainstorming with our mentor, we decided on an octopus. It was originally a random suggestion, but as we thought about it more, an octopus seemed perfect:

• they are often known for being smart
• they have many different tentacles to control different things
  • essential to our idea of kids controlling anything they can imagine with their brains)
• the giant squid axon was the first action potential measured in neuroscience!

Getting inspiration

Now that we knew we wanted an octopus, we wanted to create our official mascot.

I looked around for inspiration pictures for a LONG time. Coming across SO many different ones. The ones below ended up being the leading ones:

Of course, when it came to picking the exact style Cephy would be drawn in, I had a strong preference for a black outline since that’s what the AI generated character from the initial project BCI Buddy stemmed from was drawn in:

Though…her eyes needed to change since everyone thought they looked very creepy. So, I looked around for popular mascots and eventually decided to go with a similar eye style to Duolingo’s owl:

Getting started

The very first version of Cephy was done in powerpoint (yes, yes..I know). Honestly it wasn’t the worst since the polygon tool & elipses were easy to. edit, but I knew. I could do somuch more.

So, I went ahead and downloaded inkscape and started using it for the first time (aside from using it for a few fun laser cutting projects)

It took a bit, but I started to get used to inkscape and made several versions of Cephy before landing on one I liked enough to share with my team and others.

Naming Cephy

We decided to name her Cephy the cephalopod since octopi are cephalopods and Cephy almost sounds like Stephy short for Stephanie so it was a perfect name that not only gave off the idea that she was a girl, but also conveyed what she was (an easter egg if you knew).

Picking her color

This. Took. Forever.

Since we kept changing the color palette for BCI Buddy, picking her exact color took a lot of time.

Here are some of the first few we tried:

During a meeting with our BCI Buddy mentor, I was showing her Cephy and her color options, and she suggested coral with a blue/teal background since she’s in the ocean. Very much inspired by this mural we saw at the coffee shop we were at (shoutout to the flower pot in la jolla!).

Finally Cephy

After so many iterations, we finally have the final version of Cephy. I drew her in all sorts of different positions thrroughout this entire process, and we ended up only using a few of them. Here are some of my favorites.

You can also check out more Cephy on the bci-buddy.com website!