Celebrating Rust’s Birthday with Karen Tölva: Creator of Ferris the Rustacean!

Today marks 10 years since the first stable release of the Rust programming language! To commemorate this special anniversary, the Rust Foundation recently commissioned a celebratory graphic from Karen Rustad Tölva: the original graphic designer of the Rust language’s beloved mascot, Ferris the crab. We hope this illustration of Ferris enjoying Rust’s birthday brings a smile to your face:

For the community members attending Rust Week in the Netherlands today, our team has been onsite all week and will have a limited number of stickers featuring this design at the “10 Years of Rust” celebration. We will also have anniversary merch available at RustConf 2025 this September—registration opening soon! In the future, we also hope to open a Rust Foundation merch store where community members around the world can buy mugs, t-shirts, stickers, and other fun items featuring this design and others, with proceeds going towards funding key priorities within the Rust ecosystem. 

Below is a brief Q&A with Karen so you can get to know the designer who brought us Ferris!

Meet Karen Rustad Tölva: Creator of Ferris!

Rust Foundation: Thanks for designing this fun anniversary graphic, Karen—and for bringing the world Ferris! Tell us about yourself! What is your relationship with Rust? What have you been up to since designing Ferris?

Karen Tolva: I’m a designer and web developer based in the Bay Area! I’ve only dabbled a little bit in writing Rust myself (e.g. Advent of Code exercises), but many of my friends and employers over the years have been Rust users. Most recently, I helped run the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt, and I started my own design company Fogwave Design, where I do freelance design, illustration, and UX engineering work.

RF: Can you tell us the story of how Ferris came to life? What inspired the design? What did you want the design to convey?

KT: In late 2014, I had a bunch of friends involved in open source software and activism who lived in a group house in San Francisco. They had an IRC channel slash virtual living room–#ptopology on Freenode, requiescat in pace—that I hung out in. A couple of people in the channel were working on pre-1.0 Rust at Mozilla and mentioned one day that they called themselves “Rustaceans,” in the same vein as e.g. “pythonistas” for Python. I thought that was adorable so I took an hour or two to draw them a cute red-orange crab with the Rust sprocket for a back. Figured a crab would be easier to make visually appealing than a lobster or a prawn.

I do not remember who in the channel suggested naming it “Ferris”. In fact, I didn’t notice the pun (a play on the word “ferrous”—a reference to iron, which is a metal that rusts) till YEARS later! I just liked the name and that it was fairly gender-neutral.

Anyway, these Rust developers asked if they could share it in #rust; I, of course, said yes! At the time, it was just a one-off piece of fan art that I thought might make my friends happy. I had no idea Ferris would spread so far and wide!

RF: What were the early sketches or iterations like? Do you remember any designs that didn’t make the cut?

KT: There were no early sketches or drafts, not even on paper! I didn’t realize what Ferris was going to become–I was just making a quick piece of art for my friends.

A few years later, I revised Ferris’s design: made the junctions more even, moved the claws down so they didn’t need the black separators, and made the legs a little less insectoid; more along the lines of what I would have taken the time to make if I’d known Ferris was going to be a star.

I don’t mind the old version of the design, though. Both versions are on rustacean.net for people to use as they please. And by now so many other people have made their spin or take on the character!

RF: What elements were important to you in making Ferris feel like a good fit for the Rust community?

KT: My path to becoming a programmer was through the free culture and open source software communities–particularly through my work with OpenHatch, whose mission was making open source communities friendlier and more accessible to more people. I liked how inclusive the Rust community was from its very early days and wanted to lean into that–a mascot that was cute and accessible, not “edgy”.

My dad was a systems programmer from a certain generation and, although my dad is awesome, the community I saw him working with seemed like an intimidating monoculture. When he tried to teach me his kind of programming as a kid, I pretty much bounced off right away. I hoped that Rust would become an alternative and make lower-level programming appealing to many more people. I think a small part of making that happen is having appealing graphics: a book cover that makes you want to pick it up, or a t-shirt that people actually want to wear out in the wild!

RF: Ferris has become such an important symbol for the Rust community. How does it feel to see your work embraced this way?

KT: I love it. It brings me so much joy to see what people do with it. I don’t care if it’s gorgeous, mediocre, or plain weird. People seem to have so much fun making things featuring Ferris.

RF: Do you have any advice for prospective contributors to Rust and/or to aspiring graphic designers?

KT: It sometimes hits me: of all the code and art and music and puzzles and other things I’ve worked on, it is quite likely that designing Ferris the Rustacean, which started as this one quick doodle I made for my friends, will be the most influential thing I will ever do in my entire life. This is both wonderful and absurd. 

I think the lessons from the unexpected popularity of a little crab design I made all those years ago can be summed up as follows: 

• Make many things. 
• Embrace whimsy. 
• Make the stuff that brings you and your friends joy, no matter if it’s weird, silly, or unpolished. 
• External success is, by and large, just an accident that happens sometimes to people who practice—and to those who show up for their community.

What a perfect sentiment to focus on today as we celebrate 10 years since Rust 1.0!

Karen, thank you for answering our burning questions and for bringing us Ferris: the beloved mascot of the Rust programming language community <3

Happy birthday, Rust!