Doughnut Kitten Celebrates One Million Guests

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Kitten images/photographs by Tania Hennessey

Visit doughnutkitten.com, and a small kitten sitting atop a cartoon doughnut will hint infinite pastel rainbows throughout your display. The positioning does simply this one factor. There is no such thing as a promoting, no advertisements—simply rainbows and a kitten, the location’s ‘pointlessness’ arguably a pleasant act of subversion. In April 2022, the web site celebrated a million guests.

Tania Hennessey

The mission is the work of Vancouver, BC-based artist, photographer, and kitten rescuer Tania Hennessy. Like many artists, her inspiration got here from a spot of ache. “Again in 2015, I began experiencing these unpredictable episodes of excruciating facial ache that made sleep not possible,” recounts Hennessy. “Late one night time, I got here throughout The Ineffective Net, a hub for all issues quirky and bizarre on the web, and have become surprisingly obsessive about this curious style of artwork. The browser-based works have been amusing, distracting, and sometimes utterly pointless.”

After her mysterious agony was identified as trigeminal neuralgia, she determined to start out engaged on a brand new mission referred to as Emoji Kittens, a sequence that playfully juxtaposed traditional kitten pictures with emojis towards minimal pastel backdrops. 

“I got here throughout The Ineffective Net, a hub for all issues quirky and bizarre on the Web, and have become surprisingly obsessive about this curious style of artwork.”

“One in all my favorite photographs within the assortment was of an lovely kitten sitting within the doughnut emoji,” says Hennessy. “It was the right character to characteristic in a delightfully distracting web site of my very own.” Doughnutkitten.com was born.

Hennessy has now been engaged on Doughnut Kitten for seven years. “Because the mission developed, it proved to be surprisingly multidisciplinary,” Hennessy says. The doughnut prop was redesigned for max kitten consolation. She illustrated a set of pastel frosted doughnuts, tweaked the web site code numerous occasions, and utterly rebuilt the pictures set from scratch.

An early iteration of Doughnut Kitten

Then, after all, there was the time spent photographing the kittens. “Throughout auditions, our lovely fashions would drift off to sleep within the prop, make playful foolish faces, and photobomb one another as we tried to get them to take a look at the digicam with every kind of toys, treats, and bizarre sounds,” she recounts.

Folks discover their approach to doughnutkitten.com from everywhere in the web: social media, hyperlinks posted in weird boards, old-school blogs, and web sites which are devoted to sharing lists of pointless web sites all funnel guests. “The visitors patterns are attention-grabbing to take a look at,” says Hennessy. “They rise excessive Monday by means of Friday, after which they drop over the weekend.”

She hopes the mission brings respite and a little bit of pleasure to guests. “For many people, going on the web is one thing we do after we wish to chill out or take a look at, however a variety of what we’re taking a look at is designed to elicit damaging emotional states like concern, anger, and disappointment. Doughnutkitten.com was created to be the alternative: an internet site that helps guests chill out, even when it’s only for a number of moments, and expertise the blissful calm that comes from gazing into Doughnut Kitten’s infinite rainbow dreamscape.” 

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The kitten’s identify is Spaghetti. He was from a litter of “pasta kittens” Hennessy fostered for Vancouver Orphan Kitten Rescue (VOKRA).

Shut up, Spaghetti incorporates a phenomenon that’s referred to as the Mona Lisa impact—a mesmerizing gaze the place the eyes seem to observe you as you progress across the picture.

Spaghetti is sitting in a 3D-printed doughnut prop which is connected to a set Hennessy constructed. There’s even an area beneath the doughnut that hides slightly pillow for max kitten consolation!

This text initially appeared within the award-winning Trendy Cat journal. Subscribe in the present day!