Notion’s new animated AI assistant looks more ‘New Yorker’ than Clippy

We’ve positioned AI as magic—something mystical and unknowable—right down to the generic sparkle icon that’s signaling AI tools across modern software. But when Notion was considering what its AI tools should look like long term, the company’s creatives got it right on the nose.

Notion AI—which launches today to package a broader suite of experiences like Google Doc access and one-click AI tools—is embodied by a new cartoon character the company has informally dubbed “Nosy.“ It looks something like if Microsoft’s Clippy grew up drinking dirty martinis and reading New Yorker cartoons. 

With a face built to shape shift for every task, Notion AI is a branded UX element that lives across Notion to encapsulate a technology most people don’t really understand. Instead of a spinning beach ball or loading bar, for instance, its eyebrows do a wave when it’s thinking.

“The nose is almost like a baton that conducts your eye,” says Rob Giampietro, Head of Creative at Notion. “For error states, it falls apart and puts itself back together.” 

The system has been more than a year in the making, and led Notion to reference media from classic Disney animation to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. But in a world crowded by AI systems that more or less do the same thing, it was all in service of cementing Notion’s unique point of view.

“We need to do something that differentiate ourselves from the sparkles in the world,” says Ryo Lu Design, Product Lead at Notion.

Picking Nosy

Notion AI was born out of weekly jam sessions with Notion’s cofounder Ivan Zhou. The team was imagining what its AI could look like when Zhou mentioned that he didn’t want Notion to feel like a productivity app at all. He wanted it to feel like playing Tears of the Kingdom. Zhou’s comment led Notion Art Director Roman Muradov to unpack how that sensation might translate into design. 

Zhou’s comment was not that of a random video game fanboy. Tears of the Kingdom sets players in an open world, with a kit of parts they can assemble into all manner of vehicle and contraption without anyone ever uttering the term “STEM.” 

“It’s very easy to build things, and there’s a complexity behind the game, but you wouldn’t tell when you’re playing it,” says Muradov. “How can you distill something to the most basic interaction—[in games] you have a primary loop of doing a little work and having a reward. And how can you translate that on a small scale, even with an avatar?” 

As Muradov—who has actually illustrated for the New Yorker and is responsible for Notion’s black-and-white sketch avatars used across its marketing—pondered the idea, he considered early experiments in AI buddies like Clippy and Microsoft Bob. Clippy in particular was both adorable and ahead of its time, but it was notably distracting.

“We wanted to learn from that,” says Giampietro. “So it’s in the background enough, but when you’re interacting, it’s meaningful, joyful, and cool.”

Muradov began his sketches by returning to the metaphor of magic. He imagined wizards wearing different hats to demonstrate different AI expertise, along with a wand that could morph into a pencil, wrench, brush, and other tools to denote function. But re-introducing magic felt like the wrong approach—it didn’t embody the notion of craft, nor did it add meaningful clarity for the user.

“The sparkle emoji is still powerful in part because people attribute AI to magic,” says Linus Lee, Notion’s AI Editor at Large. “But it’s hard to understand what it’s doing.”

“A lot of companies jumped to a magic metaphor or a human metaphor,” he continues, “because other humans are also hard to understand. We wanted to capture this dynamism—under other contexts and commands [Notion AI] might do something different—but we didn’t want it to feel like it has its own will and do something you don’t want.”

Instead of settling on magic, Muradov studied depictions of humanity through the game Katamari, the paper masks of Bruno Munari, and the Mac Finder icon (inspired by Susan Kare). He also explored the possibility of anthropomorphizing an inkwell, notebook, Notion’s own cube, and all manner of cute animals for the job. “I was thinking a lot when you see faces in things, how can you suggest an expression” he recalls. For some time, Muradov was drawn to a light bulb, in part because the filament already resembled a face. 

Ultimately, he ditched the idea of anthropomorphizing an object, and created Notion AI out of a pared back presentation of strokes. “I was very much interested in abstraction, and how can a face be more than just something recognizable, almost like a glyph,” he says. That abstraction allowed Notion to blur anthropomorphization and automation, and through a bit of animation, this face could twist to embody just about any behavior artists and AI developers could imagine.

“Rather than have the character’s permanent state be whacky [like Clippy], we do that in interstitial states,” says Giampietro. 

The face as a video game

When Zhou said he imagined Notion AI as a video game, he was being metaphorical, but also literal. He originally suggested the ambitious idea that Notion AI could run entirely in its own game engine, rendered with ostensibly unlimited capability. Perhaps it could even be drawn procedurally, so every frame of Notion AI was a fresh invention simulating a real sensation of being alive.

But a video game within an app would suck a lot of power from your phone, so the team compromised by developing Notion AI with the interactive motion graphics platform Rive, which allowed them to both animate the character and still tweak the AI’s states with code. 

Notion AI still has all sorts of faces in the ready at any given moment. It features a randomized set of idle states, meaning sometimes it’ll blink, others it’ll look around. And in a UX slight of hand, sometimes the AI will cease animation to save power, before instantly coming back to life to handle a task.

Notion AI’s omnipresence across the Notion app adds character to the experience, but it’s really intended to unify the company’s discrete UI tools that can generate a document in your style, or search your entire workspace for a certain piece of information. “It almost starters to feel like part of your cursor,” says Lee. “You look at any page…whatever your locus of attention, the AI is also attending to it.”

How Notion AI evolves from here isn’t entirely clear, but based upon sketches and debates the company shared, it seems that Notion AI could one day be several AIs—characters, known as agents—that you might interact with to embody a wider array of capabilities. 

“An agentic future is probably within our future,” says Giampietro. “But right now, I think we have to make people comfortable with being helped [by AI] . . . that’s the first step.”