In the days leading up to the launch of Android (back in 2007), Dan Morrill, head of developer relations for the platform, took some time to doodle up some “eye candy” for some presentation slides. He came up with four early Android mascot designs.
My job was developer relations, but I took a much-needed break of a couple hours and spent some quality time with Inkscape to create these… things.
See, we were prepping for an internal developer launch (meaning, we were going to ask Googlers to start fooling with the APIs and give us early feedback), and I had no eye candy for the slides we were putting together. Hence these guys.
The “Dandroids” as they became known became the first proposed mascots for Android. Despite some “minor popularity amongst the team,” another design, that of the bugdroid, (fortunately?) became the official Android mascot.
Morrill also revealed that the internal developer launch was called “R2-D2” which stood for “Release to Developers 2.” Given the small issue of many robot names being trademarked, Google eventually opted for the dessert naming scheme.
Check out Dan’s post for one more design!
Read more: Dan Morrill [via Google+]