Name: Creating Clippy: The Story Behind Microsoft's Iconic Assistant
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T16:54:19.000Z
Duration: 4 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

Past simple

My name is Kevan Atteberry and I write and illustrate books for children.

Back in the 90s, I had a graphic design company, got to do a little bit of work for Microsoft and I was asked to design some characters for a project called Microsoft Bob.

Which may be one of their biggest failures.

It was software for people having their first computer experience.

They ported the character technology over to Microsoft Office.

We went through 260 character designs to get down to the 10 that shipped with the product.

Coming up with Clippy was not as big of stretch as as you might have think.

Well, it's obviously an office thing, I loved the simplicity of a paper clip as a character, I love the flexibility, all the things I could do.

I love the fact that I was just using eyes because eyes can be so expressive and you know, it simplifies my work too, right?

I think I designed about 20 or 22 characters.

I had a stapler, I had a stubby little pencil, I had a coffee mug.

I'd do a lot of sketches, just hundreds of sketches.

Once I got to where I liked it, I would scan it in, then start working on it digitally.

Once we had all the characters designed, they were handed over to social psychologists at Stanford University in California to help us start winnowing out some of the characters.

The professors would bring, you know, general public in.

They'd ask things like, is this character trustworthy, is the character likable, does he have a sense of humor?

Through that process, they were able to eliminate characters until they got down to the final 10 characters.

Obviously, they needed a default one and obviously the most trustworthy, endearing, engaging, likable character happened to be Clippy.

There were people there that were not happy that Clippy kept making it through every level.

Two and a half, three years that I did for Microsoft was a really great time in my life.

And it just seemed like maybe it was a good time to leave.

And then I didn't think much about it until I kept hearing that, oh yeah, Windows has shipped with this this character, this paper clip.

Everywhere you turned, I mean people just hated that paper clip, they wanted to turn him off, there's no way to turn him off and his functionality was too basic and and annoying for most people.

I would never, never include Clippy in my in my portfolio because I was so embarrassed of him.

One time, I was at a client's office, she was pulling something up on her computer to show me what she was looking for and up popped Clippy.

And I looked at it, I go, oh, I I created that.

Honestly, Clippy has opened so many doors for me over the years.

People that just are very receptive to it.

And now, you know, nobody hates Clippy now.

He's on the Simpsons and Family Guy and he shows up everywhere.

I had no idea, you know, obviously how big he was going to be, I mean, holy cow, if I could have seen into the future and realized, I would have probably tried to get my contract written differently.

He's a character that everybody understands his motive, he's a guy that's just just wants to help and he's a little bit too helpful sometimes.

And there's something fun and vulnerable about that.

It doesn't matter if you like him or hate him, as long as you know who he is, I have cache.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Creating Clippy: The Story Behind Microsoft's Iconic Assistant

vulnerable

incredible

process

engage