Not a character who teaches tones. The tone itself, alive. Toni is a single tapering brush stroke whose centreline is the pitch contour you are practising, with two eyes at the thick end. Practise 南 nán and Toni rises with you. There is no body attached to the stroke, because the stroke is the whole animal.
Toni has no gender. The name comes from tones, not from a person —
naming-research.md — and both original briefs already write Toni as it throughout.
In UI copy Toni is always just “Toni”; in specs, “it”. Never he, never she.
Every shape below is generated from one tapered-ribbon function under a different pitch
curve — the identity is the mark, and the tone is what it is doing. That is the founding idea from
app-vision.md (“the mascot is the pedagogy — its body is the thing being taught”),
finally taken literally.
Expression comes from posture, not from a face doing more work — the same reason the Pixar lamp reads without one. Cheap to animate: one path morph and a hop, no rigging, which was a stated constraint from day one.
A stroke is the one form that stays itself at 24px. No outline to thin out, no facial detail to mush, no silhouette to misread. It is also, unmodified, an app icon and a favicon.
My first proposal, kept here for comparison. The cultural anchor is genuinely good — the 八哥 is the bird Chinese culture knows for imitating human speech. But it is a container for the idea rather than the idea: the crest draws the tone while the bird is just a bird, and “language app, therefore bird” is the most crowded move in the category. It also costs the most to draw, animate, and keep on-model.
It had the right instinct — the tail was the tone — but it bolted that tail onto a yellow blob, and the blob is the part that failed: unprompted adult viewers read the silhouette as a tadpole. Deleting the body keeps everything that worked and removes the only thing that didn’t. Its imperial yellow retires with the manhua look regardless.
Temporary reference, hand-built 2026-07-28 — generated geometry, not a commissioned asset, and
deliberately plain so the idea is what gets judged. If this holds, this sheet becomes the illustrator brief and
replaces product/brand/toni.md. Sources: brainstorm/tonispeak/docs/app-vision.md,
planning/naming-research.md, product/brand/toni.md.