Born as a doodle and raised in design reviews, Cal is SeaLab's resident squid — brand compass, studio mascot, and occasional troublemaker.
Meet Cal
Every studio has a soul. Ours has a squid.
Cal — SeaLab's one-eyed mascot — has been with us since the beginning. He started as a doodle in 2014 when SeaLab was born, and he's grown up right alongside the studio: through rebrand cycles, new team members, new clients, and a decade of design work that's taken us from small web projects to complex enterprise products.
He's not just a logo. He's a brand compass. When we ask "does this feel like SeaLab?" — we're partly asking "does this feel like Cal?"
Where Cal Came From
SeaLab's founder Heather White sketched Cal early in the studio's life, looking for a brand identity that felt different from the typical design agency aesthetic. Most agencies default to clean geometric logos and safe neutrals. Heather went a different direction — a one-eyed squid in purple.
It was a deliberate choice. SeaLab had just been founded on the principle of going against the grain: remote-first before it was common, human-centered before it was a buzzword, and boldly purple when the industry told her that wasn't professional. Cal was the visual embodiment of that same spirit.
How Cal Has Changed
Over the years, Cal has been redesigned several times — each iteration reflecting where SeaLab was as a studio at that moment. Early Cal was loose and hand-drawn, full of personality but still finding his form. Later versions brought more refinement, more consistency, more craft — mirroring SeaLab's own growth from scrappy startup to experienced design partner.
Each redesign kept the essentials: one eye, recognizable squid proportions, and an unmistakable sense of curiosity and character. The soul stayed constant. The execution got sharper.
The most recent version of Cal reflects the SeaLab of today — a studio with 10+ years of experience, deep design system expertise, and a reputation for delivering work that holds up over time. He's still the same curious squid. He just shows it better now.
Cal in the Wild
Cal shows up everywhere at SeaLab. He's on the website, in our Figma files, on birthday cards, on team merch, and occasionally in client presentations when we need to break the tension. He's appeared in illustrated blog headers, animated for social, and — in one memorable moment — rendered in multiple colors to celebrate the Pantone Color of the Year.
He's also appeared in success states. One of our favorite design decisions we've made for a client involved a whimsical illustrated mascot as a room reservation confirmation screen for iOFFICE's Hummingbird app. That instinct — to use illustration and character to bring warmth to functional interfaces — is very Cal.
What Cal Represents
At a surface level, Cal is a mascot. At a deeper level, he represents what SeaLab believes about design: that craft and personality aren't opposites, that the best work has warmth in it, and that a design agency can be both serious about quality and genuinely fun to work with.
He's also a reminder that the best brands are built over time. Cal didn't become iconic overnight. He evolved through iteration, feedback, and the kind of patient refinement that makes a good design great.
Kind of like everything else we do here.
Want to see what we've been building? Explore our work.