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Comment by john_cogs | Hacker News Reader

The GitLab logo/mascot is actually a tanuki, a Japanese racoon dog. It symbolizes our values as a smart animal that works in a group to achieve a common goal.

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Your logo is a fox to everyone though, doesn't really matter what the intent was.

No worries, the tanuki and kitsune (fox) are often associated together, as friends or rivals, and have similar folkloric powers and trickster natures. In fact in recent Mario games, when he acquires a tanuki leaf, Luigi transforms into a kitsune.

Agree as a Japanese.

It even is a fox to GitLab as some commenter pointed out, read the file name:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-artwork/-/blob/9b07772f...

Not going to lie, I just learned moments ago it wasn't a fox, and honestly looking at tanuki images on google, is still looks more like a fox then it does a tanuki. For me it's the colors throwing everything off.

Y'all are gonna get really bored of explaining that your dog-like silhouette in distinctively fox colors is a brown raccoon dog.

You might as well have a bright yellow circle to represent the moon.

If the intent of the redesign was to make this more apparent, it also failed in that goal. Old and new both look like a fox.

Old(er) tanuki-like logo for comparison https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-artwork/-/blob/9b07772f...

The intent of the redesign is for the logo to reflect GitLab's place at the center of the DevOps infinity loop.

Why not just do some play on an infinite loop then?

If you check out the post, you can see/read how it is a play on an infinity loop.

Gitlab is at the center of the devops infinity loop huh? News to me

Wait, but the other image file is named fox.png? https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-artwork/-/blob/9b07772f...

That's pretty damn funny.

Not quite. The new one also looks like an evil owl. The old one didn't have a beak.

Be honest, you picked it because Tanuki Mario is the best Mario.

...I mean. It doesn't hurt ;)

Ah (totally serious comment, not intending to be insulting or flippant): I always thought it was just a cheeky copy of GitHub's Octocat, because that's how GitLab started too, an open source implementation of GitHub.

Didn't know about this animal, pretty cool.

I believe the Tanuki are much more known in the symbolic sense as mischevious and shapeshifting though no?[1] At least in Japan, where they are native to. There always seems to be one outside of an Izakaya with a flask of sake.[2]

[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-tanuki-japan-s-tri...

[2] https://www.alamy.com/ceramic-statues-of-two-bake-danuki-tan...

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