How an O’Reilly animal is born [The More You Know]

One of the more interesting and endearing branding trends in book publishing is the O’Reilly animal.  Those intricately drawn creatures staring up at you from the cover of a tech manual have become a staple of the geek world, but how are the animals chosen and how are they created?

O’Reilly once again has the answers to these questions.  In short, the animals are not usually chosen for deep, mysterious qualities but usually just because someone wants to make a pun, a play on words or just has some sort of abstract feeling that a particular animal “goes” with a particular subject.

Read how an O’Reilly animal is made here or the history of the animals here.

From the history of the O’Reilly animals:

Since the late 1980’s, when I designed the first O’Reilly Animal covers, I’ve been deluged with questions from our customers about how I choose the animals. People have all sorts of theories about why a specific animal is chosen for a specific topic. Even the authors of the books ask questions–some authors have been upset with my choices because they think people will think they are as fat as a hippopotamus, or as silly as a blue-footed booby. I never reveal the reasons behind my choices, but I can assure all interested parties that there is always a reason. (No, I’m not going to tell you here, either.)
When I was first approached by O’Reilly to propose new covers for their books, I was immersed in the VAX/VMS world of Digital Equipment Corporation. I had heard of UNIX, but I had a very hazy idea of what it was. I had never met a UNIX programmer or tried to edit a document using vi. All of the terms associated with vi, sed and awk, uucp, lex, yacc, curses, to name just a few, sounded to me like words that might come out of a popular game called “Dungeons and Dragons.” I developed a mental picture of the UNIX programmer as a “Dungeons and Dragons” player. As I started to look for imagery for the book covers, I came across some wonderful wood engravings from the 19th century. The strange animals I found seemed to be a perfect match for all those strange-sounding UNIX terms, and were esoteric enough to appeal to what I believed the UNIX programmer type to be.

Tim liked the quirkiness of the animals, and thought it would help to make the books stand out from other publishers’ offerings. Today, the O’Reilly animal brand is well known all over the world.