An ode to cats

We have a rule at our studio. Every blog post gets a hero image. Every hero image is a cat. The cat is always Victorian. The cat is always chonky. And the cat is always, without exception, at least a little bit cursed.

We've been doing this since 2021. It started because we kept getting blocked on hero images. Someone would write a post, then spend 45 minutes trying to find a stock photo that wasn't terrible. So we killed the decision. Every post gets a cat. No debate. No Unsplash. Just a rotund feline in period-appropriate clothing, staring into your soul with slightly wrong eyes.

We just published the full collection: Ode to cats

https://robotostudio.com/blog/ode-to-cats

Roboto Studio

Five years of Victorian cat blog illustrations

Every AI-generated Victorian cat hero image we have made since 2021, shown in full color, with notes on the models behind them.

The early ones are DALL-E 2, at the very start of AI image generation. They are deeply unsettling. One has human hands. Several appear to be melting. There's a period where every cat looks more like a weasel than a cat. We did not do this on purpose. We loved them anyway.

By 2023 the models got better and the cats got fatter. DALL-E 3 gave us cats with actual waistcoats, actual monocles, and actual cat faces. The jump in quality was huge but we sort of missed the old abominations. There's something about a cat that's 60% cat and 40% eldritch horror that really sells a blog about headless CMS architecture.

We tried Replicate Flux for a while. Hated it. The cats came out soulless. Sharp features, no personality. We switched back to OpenAI and eventually built the whole thing into our own pipeline running GPT-Image-1.5, deployed as a separate Next.js app on Vercel. Now, we can generate a big round cat, outpaint it wider with Google Vertex, slap on a halftone filter, upload to Vercel Blob. Done.

On the blog index they show up in grayscale with a halftone overlay, so they all look unified. But underneath each one is a full-colour oil painting of a chubby cat.

55 cats. Five years. At least four different AI models. One cat is operating a steam train. One is confessing its love to a sweetheart. One is headless, because the blog was about headless CMS and we couldn't resist.

We're not stopping any time soon.