Custom means more than a new color
A custom website mascot should be shaped by its role, audience and product environment. A developer tool may need a calm, observant companion. A creative product may welcome more expressive motion. The same gesture can feel helpful in one context and distracting in another.
Begin with a behavior brief. Define what the character notices, how it responds and what it never does. This gives design, animation and engineering a shared target before the rig grows into a large set of unrelated states.
Build a small, coherent behavior vocabulary
List the everyday states first: neutral idle, greeting and pointer awareness. Then identify the product moments that genuinely benefit from expression. A completed setup, an empty workspace and a failed action may each need a different response.
Not every backend event should animate the character. Group similar moments into a small number of readable expressions, and keep the website’s text responsible for precise information. This reduces visual noise and makes the system easier to test.
Decide which state wins
Real products can produce events close together. A visitor might hover a CTA while a task finishes, or click the character while an error is shown. Define a priority order so the rig does not switch randomly or play incompatible reactions at once.
A useful brief specifies which states interrupt others, whether triggers are queued or ignored and how long each temporary reaction lasts. Persistent states such as AI listening need a clear exit condition. These rules become part of the state machine and developer reference.
Plan variants and ownership
If the character will appear across a marketing site, an app and campaign graphics, list those contexts early. Different crops, backgrounds or poses may need dedicated artwork rather than repeated scaling of one composition. Keep one recognizable core silhouette across variants.
The proposal should define editable artwork, rig source, export formats, usage rights and responsibility for future updates. A .riv runtime file and an editable source project serve different purposes; do not assume that one automatically includes the other.
Deliver against a real acceptance checklist
Review the character at its intended size on representative desktop and mobile devices. Test transitions, repeated events, offscreen behavior, reduced motion and loading failure. A polished recording is useful for review, but the browser preview is where the integration earns confidence.
Choose mascot design if you need the character created, or bring existing artwork for a suitability review. The advanced product path covers richer states and custom logic; the final scope depends on the interaction vocabulary you agree to ship.