A place for people to come out of

The shape

A blob is a path swept by a broad nib. The same path with the same pen always gives the same blob.

• Draw it only with the pen from the lab, from a path in assets/line. Never a generic brush, never by hand, never by an image model.
• New shapes come from the lab's generator, variations of A and B. Keep one by its seed and save its path as an asset.

The pen

Nib

broad, superellipse n = 8

Width

27% of the shape's height

Thickness

0.12 of the width

Angle

35°

Ends

cut square, leaning up to 45° toward the pen

Path smoothing

0.5

The generator

It takes A or B and varies it by a seed. The same seed always gives the same blob: to keep one, note its seed and save its path to assets/line.

The place and the people

The blob is the place where a conversation happens. The people in it are real cut-outs, and they always relate to the blob in one of two ways.

Out of the blob, or in front of it

• Out of the blob. The person stands inside and comes up over its top edge. The blob cuts them only along its lower edge; above that line, over the head and shoulders, nothing is cut. The neck enters the blob at its top edge.
• In front of the blob. The person stands over it and is cut by the bottom of the frame, never by the blob.
• Never cut the top. The whole head, hair included, stays inside the frame and below the top margin. Only the bottom of a person is ever cut: by the blob or by the frame.

The fill

• A colour: the other green, never the ground's own. Lime blob on Primary Dark, Primary Dark blob on Lime.
• Or the place itself: a photo of where the conversation happens — the café for a barista, the store for a sales associate, the lobby for the front desk — blurred by 0.5% of the picture's width, so the person stays the subject. Never a sharp photo, never a place that doesn't match the person.

Size and place

• The blob takes 75–95% of the picture's width.
• The person is 60–75% of the picture's height: large enough that the face reads at feed size. The face sits in the upper half; the head never goes above the top margin.
• Placement: centred on the blob, or shifted away from the text so the face stays clear. The text sits on the opposite margin.
• Layers: ground, blob, text, people. A head may cross the text; the text never covers a face.
• Two people are in a conversation: turned to each other, close enough to touch, cut by the blob as one.
• One or two blobs per picture.

Small blobs in a line of text

• Size: 1.3–1.7× the type size. It stands in a line like a word, on the baseline.
• Its people rise only into free space: above the text, or under the end of a shorter line. They never cover a word.
• One per line, two per picture at most.

Don't

• Cut a head or hair by the top of the frame or by the blob.
• Fill the blob with a sharp photo, or with the ground's own colour.
• Mirror a person, or let an image model draw the blob.
• Put a person so small the face doesn't read, or let the text cover a face.

See it in use ↗