fernie is the face of Work Suite: the approved module squircle in deep soil, a fiddlehead antenna, and two spring-green LED eyes that read like a device display, not a cartoon. He earns his warmth through micro-motion — a blink at rest, a scan while thinking — and he keeps his credibility through restraint: he appears only where he literally speaks (launcher, chat, loading and empty moments), and he goes straight-faced whenever money is on the screen.
The marketing side is done: twelve library cards and two Cultivate booth pieces exist today, most cleared to ship. What does not exist yet is fernie in the product. Announcing a character who is not in the software would be a costume, not a launch — so the sequence below puts the product work first and the requirements brief in section 04 is the ask.
| id | what it is | format | clearance |
|---|---|---|---|
| fern-01 | Meet fernie — launch announcement | 1200×627 | SHIP-READY |
| fern-02 | The six states of fernie | 1600×900 | SHIP-READY |
| fern-03 | Placement rules — where fernie lives | 1600×1000 | INTERNAL |
| fern-04 | Booth standee — hi, i’m fernie | 800×2000 | SHIP-READY |
| fern-05 | Sticker sheet no. 1 | 1200×900 | SHIP-READY |
| fern-06 | Launch email header | 1200×400 | SHIP-READY |
| fern-07 | Avatar plate — fernie, cropped | 1200×900 | SHIP-READY |
| fern-08 | Just ask — launcher frame | 1600×900 | SHIP-READY |
| fern-09 | Three panels — how a save happens | 1600×700 | SHIP-READY |
| fern-10 | The straight-face rule | 1200×900 | INTERNAL |
| fern-11 | Wardrobe plate — little hats only | 1600×900 | SHIP-READY |
| fern-12 | Fourth of July stamp | 1080×1080 | SHIP-READY |
| sf-portrait-10 | Ask fernie — booth screen | 1080×1920 | SHIP-READY |
| sf-portrait-13 | fernie screensaver — booth loop | 1080×1920 | SHIP-READY |
fern-01 – fern-12, batch dir batches/fern/) and the Cultivate portrait pack (sf-portrait-10-ask-fernie, sf-portrait-13-fernie-screensaver). The booth screensaver loops on a booth TV — a marketing surface. In the product a looping fernie is banned: on a loop it is a screensaver.Product, design, and support meet fernie first. The gate to move on: the placement rules and the straight-face rule are understood by everyone who puts pixels on a screen, and the section 04 requirements are accepted into the backlog.
Launcher greeting and chat states ship behind a flag to beta tenants. fern-08 already mirrors the target launcher frame; the avatar plate governs every export. The gate: real growers have seen him and the kill switch works.
The site gets fernie in the same places the product does — launcher-style hero moments and loading states — plus the three-panel save story as a page asset. No fernie on pricing pages; the straight-face rule applies to marketing too.
fern-01 goes up first and stays pinned. fern-08 is the second post — the character earns his keep by showing a save, not by being cute. fern-09 exports panel-by-panel as a carousel. The launch email carries the fern-06 header and goes out with the first post.
The standee greets at the open corner, sticker sheets go into hands, and the portrait screens rotate the “ask fernie” panel with the screensaver loop. Demo stations show the real launcher greeting — the booth promise and the product must match.
Per leadership direction: little hats and such — small tradeoffs only, the silhouette never changes. Each season earns exactly one small hat; the 4th of July cone is first (fern-12 is the social stamp, fern-11 is the dress code). Hats appear in product only after requirement 6 ships; until then the wardrobe is social-only.
This is the ask. Ten requirements, each with the acceptance criterion that makes it done. The character rules are already settled by the approved study — the work here is enforcement, wiring, and plumbing, not design.
A central registry of surfaces where fernie may render. Allowed: launcher greeting, chat, loading and empty moments. Banned: data grids and documents (invoices, POs, pick lists), any error involving money, and every customer-facing surface (Portal included). Placement is not per-feature discretion — a component that isn’t registered cannot draw the face.
One component, six states, transitions only through named events. At rest the only motion is the blink, every 4–5 seconds. The done face plays once per completion and returns to rest — it never loops.
| state | entering trigger | motion | exits to |
|---|---|---|---|
| rest | default / any state settles | blink every 4–5 s, nothing else | any |
| listening | chat input focused or user typing | eyes brighten and widen, faster blink | thinking on submit; rest on blur |
| thinking | request submitted; fernie reading data | eyes scan side to side, antenna pulses | working or done |
| working | long-running job or draft generation | half-lidded eyes, antenna pulses hard | done on success; rest + plain-type error otherwise |
| done | answer shipped, plan saved, draft accepted | the grin, once | rest |
| straight | financial context flag (R3) | none — LEDs dim to neutral | prior state when flag clears |
A financial-context flag settable at route or component level. When set, LEDs render neutral #5F6F6A, the glow and mouth drop, and all animation stops — it overrides every other state. Covers invoices, pricing, credits, and any failure with money attached.
One greeting card in the launcher: first name, one number-first observation from the tenant’s own data, one action. The pattern: “Morning, Adam. 4 stores ran low on 1-gal perennials overnight. Want the draft? I already did the math.” Charm rides on competence — the face and the number arrive in the same breath.
Inside fernie surfaces only, the thinking and working states replace the generic spinner — visibly reading, then visibly building. Everywhere else in Work Suite the existing spinner stays. No global swap.
A date-ranged wardrobe slot that renders hat overlays only. Per leadership direction: little hats and such, small tradeoffs only, the silhouette never changes. Default-on with a per-tenant kill switch. The 4th of July cone ships first. A hat never renders on the straight face.
Under prefers-reduced-motion the face goes fully static — no blink, no scan, no pulse (the CSS on this very page already does this). The face itself is decorative: greeting and chat text is the real content and reads normally; the character never traps focus or announces its own state changes.
Tenant-level and user-level setting: turn fernie off. Off means plain Silver Fern surfaces — standard spinner, plain-text greeting — with no feature loss and no layout shift. Some operations will not want a character near their numbers; that has to be one toggle, not a request to support.
If fernie is worth shipping he is worth measuring. Three event families, each carrying surface id and tenant, so we can answer the only question that matters: does the face make people use the help more?
One canonical character file — squircle, antenna, six faces, wardrobe anchor — that both the product component and marketing exports build from. The avatar plate (fern-07) defines the crops: 512, 128, 48, 24 px; at 24 px the mouth and antenna drop. Today the geometry lives in the library cards; hand-copying it into the app guarantees drift.