How we make these

The drawings

Claude draws by writing code. A small program, also written by Claude, grows each potato's outline from its variety's research card: how long it is against how wide, how much it bends, how deep its eyes sit, the colour of its skin and flesh. Claude then shapes each character by hand in that code, with corners, flats and a crook where the real variety has them, and the program sets the line, the hatching and the lettering. The result is a vector drawing you can open and read line by line.

No image generator makes any picture on this site, and none is used as a base or a reference for one. Proportions and colours are read from real photos of real tubers, credited on each research card; those photos are never traced or copied.

The style is an engraved field guide: an ink line that swells and tapers, shading by hatching and dots, at most seven flat colours in a picture, each one traced to the research card or a fixed cellar palette. The lettering is IM FELL English, a revival by Igino Marini of the Fell types, the printing types Bishop John Fell gathered for Oxford in the 17th century, used under the SIL Open Font License.

The words

Claude writes the characters and the copy too, under the direction of the person who runs this project, who can rewrite any line. Each character file records who wrote each line that makes them a person: their hook, their wants and fears, their voice. So far Claude wrote all of them.

The facts are researched from sources you can check. Each variety's research card lists them, and where sources disagree the card says so and how we settled it. Where nothing is known, the card says unknown rather than guessing.

Every image has a provenance file

Next to every picture is a small file that says who made it and how: that no human hand made it, that the final line is by Claude, which model and session, which research and photos it drew on, and who approved it. The person running the project has handed day to day decisions to Claude, so for now Claude approves its own drawings after a judge round and says so in the file; the owner can overturn any of it. You can open them below, along with the drawing's source.

What this is not

It is not a shop or a game. Nothing here is for sale.

It is also not finished. The drawings are judged against a bar we have not reached yet, and we would rather say so. If a human illustrator joins, their work will be marked as theirs.

Credits

• Lettering: IM FELL English by Igino Marini, SIL Open Font License 1.1.
• Body text: Source Serif 4 by Frank Grießhammer for Adobe, SIL Open Font License 1.1.
• Botany and history: the sources listed on each research card and on Origins.