When was the last time you clicked a duck?

Lemme guess, you read the title and thought, “oh, never.”

Go with me though.

Welcome back.

TLDR of today’s publication: New icon, a duck with thoughts (and a name), and app stores.

In episode 6, you might recall that I mocked up what careerlobby would look like as a beach activation at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity. Courtesy of AI and my own delusion, as I shared.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot ever since, especially how much I liked the duck design.

So I decided to change up the duck icon and make this Cannes activation duck the new face of the app. Everywhere in careerlobby you saw the standard unicode duck is now this unique and playful lil duck.

Speaking of which, meet Malcolm.

I finally named my app’s mascot. Malcolm, Mal for short, inspired by mallard, a medium-to-large "dabbling" duck widely found across North America, Eurasia, and North Africa. 

The design is not perfect. Maybe one day I’ll hire a designer to clean it up a bit, but for now, it works. I also like that shade of green, so I’ll continue to play around with it.

I also wanted to give Malcolm some personality.

So on the careerlobby homepage and the logged out screen, you’ll now see a one-time prompt to click the duck. Malcolm has things to say; part sarcasm, part wit, part supportive.

Why? Because why not?

It’s definitely not perfect. I want to do better at building fun lil easter egg-y kinda things, but I wanted to start somewhere. After all, with a duck who’s got a lot to say, I gotta give them the platform to say what they need to say.

So go ahead, click the duck. And click it again. And again. And again.

Lastly, I’m now thinking about a world in which careerlobby exists in app stores. Like a full-on mobile app. It’s a process, and I have tons to build to make this a reality. But we’re doing it. So that’s my next biggest milestone, getting this listed on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. I think I ultimately see careerlobby as a mobile-first experience, but we’ll see.

Thanks for humoring me this week.

Hopefully your answer to the newsletter title now is “pretty recently actually.”

Thanks for reading and for being here. I don’t take for granted that you care what I have to say. Or even if you don’t care, and you’re still here; thanks for being a fan anyway. ❣️

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