When last we left Queequeg the Quadra Quoll, he was but a single drawing, with dreams of digital mascot glory. That was five years ago, and a lot has changed, Queequeq has been around the block and seen things... terrible things. Luckily, his dreams of digital mascot-ery have yet to be beaten from him by this topsy-turvy world!
Rather than hopping over to what would become part one of this series, allow me to provide a brief refresher: Queequeg is a cartoon Australian quoll I concocted for Quadra, the software my paying gig produces. In the not so distant past, my goals for Queequeg were:
...next installment I’ll dive into creating quoll images for various web error pages, the Queequeg bio, the works!Owen, June 2020
With this in mind, I set out to complete sketches of character poses to pull from when designing Quadra's status pages. I say "complete" because these were started back in 2020 and abandoned for reasons unknown (let's just blame COVID). I picked them back up in late 2024 when primary development of Quadra v10 was nearing completion.
 |
| Rough sketches of the various Queequeg poses |
 |
| Refined sketches, attempting to keep features more "on model" |
 |
| Final inked and colored versions |
Now lets move onto the real meat of this endeavor, setting up the biography and the status pages in Quadra! These are essentially html and css with the above images peppered in, however this first one has a never before seen (in this post) image of a quoll riding a dolphin. You're welcome.
 |
| Queequeg's biography page |
In case you're wondering, no that isn't AI generated text, that's good old fashioned human generated craziness. I don't need vector based semantic algorithms to hallucinate, I can do that just fine myself! Take that AI (please don't kill me).
Moving onto to the status pages:
 |
| Forbidden status page (html status 403 for you nerds) |
 |
| Not found status page (html status 404) |
 |
| Error status page (html status 500) |
The astute viewer will notice that the pages above are not at https://quadra.aeti-inc.com, but rather they are housed on http://www.aeti-inc.com. Why? Because after rolling out Quadra v10, along with these awesome status pages, I was informed they were not conservative enough and needed to be changed.
 |
In hindsight this makes sense, as the insurance industry is just about as staid as it gets. So Quadra's errors have been changed to this lovely style:
 |
| Conservative error status page |
Oh well! Queequeg endures on the AETI corporate site, and as an added bonus each status page chooses from two different Queequeg images. Feel free to obsessively refresh them hoping for new images!