Funny but true story about PHP mascot

Hello everyone!! Today I am going to discuss about a funny but true story which is related with the PHP mascot. I think many of us already know about this. But those who don’t know yet, I can assure them if they read it they will definitely get some fun. So let’s start !!

If we look at the PHP mascot we will see an elephant. But what can be the relation between a programming language and an elephant ?

Well!! It was the year of 1998. On that time PHP was not popular in France. Only few French websites talked about it. Among them Jean-pierre Dezelus provided much information about PHP in his personal website. Jean-pierre Dezelus was a collector of elephants in his professional life.

Now let’s talk about another French people whose name is Vincent Pontier aka Elroubio. He is almost 44 years old. He is the Head of Human Resources of the Communication Group INSIGN in his professional life.

Vincent Pontier - Creator Of elePHPants Logo

Vincent Pontier had a friend whose name was François BUFFIÈRE. François BUFFIÈRE was a web developer. On an evening of November François came to Vincent’s home. At the time coding François talked about PHP to Vincent. He also talked about what can be done using PHP. These things were seemed very interesting to Vincent. While François was coding Vincent took a white sheet of paper and wrote “PHP” in capital form on the paper for making fun. But suddenly he noticed that the letters were forming a shape of an elephant if it was viewed in a sideways angel. After seeing this both of them were too much excited. They sent the drawing to Jean-pierre Dezelus, I have already introduced him above of this article.

So, Jean-pierre Dezelus was too much happy after seeing the drawing and he asked Vincent Pontier to create an elephant as true PHP logo using a blue oval with a black outline gradient.

They put the elephant logo on Jean-pierre Dezelus’s website for downloading. They gave a beautiful funny name to the logo which was “elePHPant”.

After that elePHPant made the history. PHP lovers grabbed the mascot with cordial love. Some people keep the mascot in front of their screen and they believe that by keeping an elePHPant in front of the screen at the time of coding their programs contains less error. Okey!! That’s not a logic actually but it comes from the deep love with the mascot. From then Vincent Pontier aka Elroubio is called the spiritual father of thousands of elePHPant around the world.

Original elePHPants Logo

So this was the interesting thing about the creation of lovely PHP mascot. Hope all of you enjoyed it.

I have collected the information from this source ( https://7php.com/elephpant/ ) for writing this article.

Thank you !!