The Meme Was
Already Famous.
Hanbao started with a viral image of a porpoise on X — a meme coin project with cultural traction already baked in. When a new team revived the project, my role was to provide the professional visual structure it lacked.
The word 'Hanbao' (漢堡) means hamburger in Mandarin — a built-in bilingual identity and a global cultural hook stretching across Eastern and Western internet communities. That duality was a feature, not a complication.
The challenge: professionalize without sterilizing. Give a meme structure, systems, and longevity — without making it feel corporate.
My intervention began by transforming the original viral porpoise photo into a fully illustrated mascot — keeping the character aligned with its cultural roots while making it versatile for marketing at any scale. The illustration needed to preserve the specific energy of the meme: unguarded, joyful, absurd. That energy is the brand. The design work was about giving it form without killing it.
To facilitate immediate content creation, the character was also developed into a ready-to-use Character Animator puppet, giving the team a live, animatable version from day one.
I built more than just a character — I provided consistency. A suite of social templates and core brand assets allowed the team and key backers to deploy fast, high-quality, on-brand content across all social channels, effectively professionalizing the project's presence overnight. The bilingual identity — HANBAO in English and 漢堡 in Chinese — was treated as a strength. Both scripts were given equal design weight, making the brand feel native to both audiences simultaneously.
The combination of a beloved viral character and a professionally executed visual system gave the revived project immediate credibility with both new and returning community members. When the community already loves the meme, your job is to not get in the way — and to build scaffolding around it that lets the love scale. That's exactly what this system was built to do.
Complete brand system built around the Hanbao porpoise mascot — identity, bilingual framework, community assets, social templates, and Character Animator puppet
Meme energy.
Brand structure.
Hanbao proves that the best meme brands don't need to choose between authenticity and professionalism. The original porpoise had cultural heat that no amount of design budget can manufacture. The work here was about earning the right to sit next to that energy — and building systems that let it spread further, faster, and with more consistency.
The bilingual identity, the illustrated mascot, and the plug-and-play asset library gave the team everything they needed to activate a community that was already waiting.