Simon Oxley (born 1969) is a British

freelance ''Freelance'' (sometimes spelled ''free-lance'' or ''free lance''), ''freelancer'', or ''freelance worker'', are terms commonly used for a person who is self-employed and not necessarily committed to a particular employer long-term. Freelance w ...

graphic designer A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography, or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, ...

who is most famous for designing the original bird logo for

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, the Octocat logo for

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

, a mascot fo
YEN
and the Cody mascot for Software.com. Oxley was a prolific contributor to the

iStockphoto iStock is an online royalty free, international micro stock photography provider based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The firm offers millions of photos, illustrations, clip art, videos and audio tracks. Artists, designers and photographers world ...

site, which he had joined because of a free promotional offer for purchasers of the

Adobe Creative Suite Adobe Creative Suite (CS) is a discontinued software suite of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications developed by Adobe Systems. The last of the Creative Suite versions, Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6), was launched at a re ...

. Both companies purchased Oxley's designs from the website (Twitter paid $10–15 for its logo, of which Oxley received $2–6) but the licence did not allow them to use the works as logos. Twitter's founders redesigned their logo in response, but GitHub asked Oxley for permission, which he granted. While the initial GitHub logo has gone on to develop into a more stylised form (the official "Invertocat" logo), GitHub developed Simon's original drawing into the Octocat logo and the character of "Mona Lisa the Octocat" which became a core part of their brand identity. Simon credits Japanese popular art as an influence on his Twitter design and others, and said he was grateful for the wide distribution of his images despite receiving very little compensation.

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* British graphic designers Logo designers 1969 births Living people People from Basingstoke and Deane People from Hampshire (before 1974) {{UK-artist-stub