Meet Nova, Accidental Mascot
Nova is a space-faring, time-traveling creature from an unknown race who has ventured back to 2025 to build awesome WordPress plugins and themes. Or he’s possibly here to just cheer me along in the process.
He came here entirely by a random act of fate.
What I really means is that I accidentally created a brand new mascot along with some help from AI and #wpdrama.
The Backstory
An article on the Afteractive blog, Has Wapuu Outlived Its Usefulness? A Critique of WordPress’s Mascot and Community Decay, has been making the rounds in recent days. It argues for the retirement of Wapuu, WordPress’s own beloved mascot.
While I don’t agree with the conclusion, I’m not here to argue with it. I’d rather go on building cool stuff with WordPress and enjoying the fun Wapuus that others create.
Besides, if you want to read counterarguments, check out:
If I was still writing for WP Tavern, I probably would’ve written my own manifesto for Wapuu as a response. But those days are far behind me.
Instead, I wanted to do what my colleague Jonathan Bossenger described as “kill em with cuteness.” And that’s exactly what I set out to do.
I wanted a Wapuu for my X3P0-branded WordPress themes and plugins. I wanted to plaster my own little version of Wapuu all over my plugin and theme pages on WordPress.org. I wanted to share the pudgy little yellow creature across social media. Kill em with cuteness.
As much as I didn’t have time for a well-written rebuttal to the original article, I also didn’t have time to spend hand drawing my own version of Wapuu, bringing him back into Photoshop, and getting the details just right.
I turned to Google Gemini with an initial prompt: Can you create me a fun icon of a WordPress Wapuu that is holding a loaf of bread?
Gemini didn’t at all give me a Wapuu. It gave me the first version of Nova.
Nova wasn’t what I was looking for, but he was what I needed. I hadn’t expected to find this path, but some small part of my soul knew I had to follow where it led.
After some back-and-forth with Gemini and a some careful adjustments in Photoshop, I had a character that I was satisfied with. And I had a use case: I wanted his first public outing to be in my Breadcrumbs Block banner and icon:
I suppose I owe some gratitude to that Afteractive article. It sparked the flame that created Nova. Now there’s one more cute and cuddly mascot in the WordPress community.
Nova, the Mascot
I’ve always wanted a mascot for my development work, but I never properly sat down and created one. It’s hard to find the time with all the other things that climb atop the to-do list.
But we’re in the middle of the AI revolution.
And as much as I love doing things the old-fashioned way using the tools that I know, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to just get things done. AI is merely another tool to push ideas to life. And sometimes it helps you create magical things that you were not expecting.
Nova is now the official mascot for my projects under the X3P0 umbrella, which is basically my personal brand for block-era WordPress themes and plugins (click the images of Nova below to find cool blocks you might not have tried yet!).
I had a lot of fun designing dozens of variations of Nova with Gemini over the weekend (the girlfriend can attest to that since she received most of them via text). It’s rarely a perfect AI tool, but it gives me a running start before pulling everything into Photoshop and Figma for further manipulation—don’t even ask me how many times I had to cut and crop a new tail on Nova!
In a lot of ways, it reminds me of my early days of the web—just creating for the sake of creating and trying new ideas with new tools. AI has truly made the web fun again. I can’t wait to see what the future holds.
Whatever it is, I’m sure you’ll be seeing a lot more of Nova in the coming weeks, months, and years. I’ve officially adopted him.
Heck, he even has his own theme song, created using Suno, another AI tool (hat tip to Troy Chaplin for the suggestion):
Until next time, keep having fun with this wild and wacky thing we call the world wide web. Don’t let the haters keep you down.