Every website needs a 404 page, and almost nobody enjoys landing on one. Ours got the same treatment as the cyclist on our homepage: no stock illustration, no icon pack, just a short Python script drawing a scene frame by frame.
The scene
A stick figure walks past a leaning "404 PAGE NOT FOUND" sign, waves, and heads off toward home with a small speech bubble pointing the way back. It fades in, plays through once, fades out, and loops. Nothing about it needed a licence or a design brief: it's built entirely from lines, circles and a bit of text, drawn with PIL (the Python Imaging Library), the same way as everything else in this series.
Same method, same reasons
The appeal isn't the animation itself, it's how quickly it came together. Sketching a walk cycle by hand (the hip bob, the leg swing, the arm counter-swing) is a maths problem more than an art problem once you break it down, and that's exactly the kind of thing an AI coding assistant is good at helping write. What used to mean commissioning an illustrator for a page almost nobody spends time on became an afternoon's work.
Where it's headed
It's built to become our site's actual 404 page, the screen anyone lands on if they hit a broken or missing link. If you enjoyed the wheels-are-our-logo trick from the cyclist piece, that one's worth a look too.
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