Special Ammos in Our Footer

During a recent update to our site’s footer, we fell backwards into a fun little easter egg. It’s easy to miss, so I thought I’d draw a little attention to it here.

When I finished mocking up the site’s new footer, the rightmost column just happened to be shorter than the others, leaving an empty space and making the design look a little off balance. To fill the space, I added an existing drawing of our mascot Ammo. This was intended as a placeholder, but it turned out that everyone liked Ammo there. He made it through the design process to go live on the site.

That wasn’t the end of the story, however, as we were soon led on a fun little diversion by an offhand comment: “He should be dressed up for holidays”. Almost as soon as the words were spoken, a bit of PHP code was implemented to automate swapping images, and I found myself drawing a couple dozen variations of Ammo for a wide variety of calendar events.

One of my favorites is the Saint Patrick’s Day Ammo. My first draft had our mascot dressed as a leprechaun. I was quite satisfied with the drawing, which was relatively detailed for something so small. But after finishing it, I was struck by some inspiration. Just like the Chicago river being dyed green, I realized that as an amoeba, the mostly-water based Ammo could also go green. I threw out my more detailed drawing in favour of a quick colour shift, making an emerald Ammo for St. Patty’s day.

I’ve included a few of the special Ammos in this post, but there are many more for you to spot on various holidays and cultural events. As I post this, the gold medal-winning Olympics Ammo is visible in the footer. Watch our footer over the course of time to see more.