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Introducing the Feeping Creature

The branding for Feep! search has tended to be minimal at best. This lack of branding is part of what made adding dark mode so easy: there’s hardly any styling to begin with, a sort of Béton brut aesthetic with only a thin layer of paint over the underlying code. Still, branding isn’t a terrible thing to have; so today I’d like to introduce you to the new mascot for my search engine.

Feep! is named after the feeping creature, a spoonerism of “creeping feature.” I’ve had an image of what a feeping creature looks like in my head for a long time: a sort of baffled, unkempt fuzzy blob, wandering about and occasionally making a noise a bit like a wild eep.

However, I do not think of myself as being very good at drawing, so this vision took a long time to appear on paper. To boost my confidence, I went to the childrens’ section of the local public library and borrowed a copy of Ed Emberly’s Big Green Drawing Book, which has a helpful section on how to draw trees:

Scribbled green pine trees, deciduous trees, a palm tree, and assorted bushes, accompanied by the header “Scribble Trees: Rembrandt used to like to make scribble trees (in his etchings)” Step-by-step guide to drawing a tree, showing some basic scribbles and how assemble a collection of them into a recognizable image.

Armed with this step-by-step guide, I began scribbling myself, trying to capture the essence of my vision on paper.

Various sketches: first, a pencilled bush; then, a pencilled-and-inked creature in the form of a bush but with sketchy eyes, arms, legs, and some stray strands of hair sticking out; finally, an inked version of the same creature but slightly better drawn, less kempt and even more sketchy.

Once I was reasonably happy with the result, it was time to switch to the computer and draw an icon. I started by copying my sketch onto a piece of graph paper, to get a rough idea of where things would end up in a 32×32 image. (I used an 8×8 section of graph paper to limit the amount of detail I could fit into my sketch, so each square represents 4×4 pixels.)

Then I opened a pixel art editor (I used Piskel, but I’m sure there are better ones out there) and started clicking around until I thought it looked decent. The end result doesn’t really match up with the sketch, but it was still helpful to have as a starting point. Drawing all the little curlicues and tufts was tricky at this scale; one pixel out of place often made the difference between recognizable tresses and indiscernible fuzz.

A rough pencil sketch of the creature, overlaid by the regular blue grid of graph paper. A pixelated image of the creature, looking bemused as usual.

I realized only after I finished drawing that I didn’t leave myself enough room for an outline, which would have been helpful for dark mode, where the feet and stray hairs get lost against the background. Still, the body is visible and quite recognizable, so I’m happy with the result.

This little critter has been set up as the favicon for Feep! Search, and also appears as a logo in the header across the site. Someday I’d also like to make sketches of them for various error pages (showing them scratching their head about a smoldering server when there’s an unexpected error, or with an empty drawer from a card catalog if there are no search results, perhaps) but for the time being I’m still tickled just to see my vision finally make it to the screen.