The house ninja
Meet Kiru.
Kiru is the ninja who lives on this site. His name is the Japanese verb kiru, “to cut” — and that’s his job here: he cuts through hype. Every page has him doing that page’s job.
Shinobi The seal is the ninja’s own character, and the brushwork is his name, kiru.
He’s watching your pointer.Tap anywhere. He’ll look.
Thirteen poses, one rig
Where you’ll find him
Every page gives him its job. Tap a card to go and see him do it.
Under the hood
How he’s made
Pure SVG, drawn on the server. A ninja costs a few kilobytes of markup and no JavaScript.
He only moves while he’s on screen. Scroll him away and he stops, so a page full of ninjas costs nothing per frame.
His eyes follow your pointer. Or your last tap, on a phone. Move around this page and the whole gallery looks.
Same colours by day and by night. Like a real object. Only his outline and a rim of moonlight change with the theme.
Decoration, to a screen reader. He’s hidden from assistive tech; the words on the page do the talking.
He never covers text or blocks a tap. Every page puts him where he can do his job without getting in the way of yours.
The rules he lives by are written down in the site’s design notes.