Game Republic Mascot

The mascot I designed, Spike the Seal, won the game republic mascot competition and will be used as their official mascot for a year!
He will be present at every event hosted/attended by the Game Republic and on every post made by them, he is also on some merchandise.
It has been such an honour and an amazing opportunity to win this competition. Seeing Spike on all of their social media posts is always such a pleasure, and I even got to see him all over the Game Republic Conference and careers event in 2026 held at The University of Salford, on name tags, mousepads, big screens etc... which was such a surreal experience.
For this design I started by grabbing all the colours of the Game Republics Logo and some other assets they frequently use, and with them being mainly blue I instantly thought of a seal, this worked really well because I also knew that the U.S Navy have a marine animal training program in which they have taught seals to play video games as a form of enrichment and many of them really enjoy it.
For the star headband I was inspired by one of their Logos that is surrounded by stars so I wanted to incorporate this into the design and tried various designs, starting with the ends of the headphones being star shapes, then followed by multiple headband designs and colours and eventually settled on the classic blue colour with their logo in white.
It was an amazing learning experience and I couldn't begin to explain the happiness I felt when I received the news.