Behind the Scenes of the Goton Generator

Hello! I'm Lu (@KatieLu333), a designer at Kaminashi who loves Figma.
Kaminashi has an official mascot character named "Goton" 🐐
We often have opportunities to use Goton illustrations in various situations, such as in presentation materials both inside and outside the company, but originally, designers would create the assets whenever they received requests from team members.
This time, I would like to share the behind-the-scenes story of how we transformed that process into a system where anyone in the company can easily create Goton assets.

The Trigger

Previously, all Goton creative production was handled by our communication designer, Nanamichi, who created them in Illustrator. When requests came from within the company like, "I want to use a Goton image! Where is the data?", they would be sent to Nanamichi.

The problems at the time were as follows:

• Communication costs and waiting times occurred whenever a creative request was made

• It was inefficient to create similar illustrations over and over again

• Managing and sharing data created in Illustrator was somewhat cumbersome

Driven by the desire to create Goton-related visuals more efficiently than before and to make it easy for anyone to create them, the "Goton System" project began.

Step 1. From Illustrator to Figma

First, we switched from Illustrator to Figma, considering both online management and the ease of creating modular components. By breaking Goton down into parts and selecting and combining the necessary parts when needed, new creative assets can be generated. Since multiple people can access it online, designing components that are easy to manage and update allows for smoother and more efficient work.
That said, since there are a huge number of Goton assets created to date, it takes time to collect and categorize them. For now, we narrowed it down to the most high-demand patterns and created a list of minimal variations.

Furthermore, when investigating Goton's usage scenarios, we found that it is also frequently used in on-site manuals and onboarding materials. For cases where Goton wears work clothes, we created clothing and accessory parts to better convey the on-site atmosphere, and also added speech bubbles where text can be entered freely.

Step 2. From Figma to Generator

However, to operate using Figma, non-designer team members would need to learn how to use it. Also, managing Figma editing accounts would be another issue. So, when we thought about whether there was an easier way, we recalled a success story where we made it possible to generate online meeting backgrounds using a generator, so we consulted with team members and, with their cooperation, began building a generator site.
When designing the generator site, we made it a point to prioritize ease of use while also incorporating a sense of playfulness. For example, to make it more intuitive to choose expressions, we moved away from stiff expressions and changed them to emojis and onomatopoeia.

The site's design concept is a dress-up doll, and we even secretly hid Goton in the background. (I doubt anyone will notice lol)

Effects & Insights

Thanks to word-of-mouth within the company and setting the generator site URL as an automatic response in Slackbot, it became known and used throughout the company faster than expected. Reducing the workload for designers is great, but being able to have everyone casually use Goton in their creative work is the most pleasing thing of all in terms of expanding Goton's potential.

While it expands possibilities, making Goton accessible to everyone in the company also makes it difficult to manage usage rules and scope, so the theme moving forward is creating an environment for healthier operations.

A quick announcement!

Kaminashi is currently looking for product designers and front-end engineers.
If you would like to help us build the best products together, please contact us via the link below 🙌