A stack of dots is standing in for a whole cat

A circle, teal, holding a cat's head and shoulders in profile as one flat black silhouette — ears up, whiskers drawn thin, looking off to one side.

Underneath it, a stacked grid of small dots, some teal, some charcoal, standing in for a row of rating fields. No labels. No numbers. No words anywhere on the shirt.

An app somewhere has names for what those dots measure. The shirt doesn't carry them over.

What is a grid of dots like this actually standing in for?

A set of rating fields from a booking profile — the kind of scorecard a sitting or boarding app generates so a stranger can decide, in a few seconds, whether to take the job.

Those apps need a fast read: a handful of short categories, each collapsed into a row of dots so a sitter scanning ten profiles in a row can compare them at a glance. The print keeps that visual shorthand and drops the words that gave each row its meaning, which is the one piece of information a stranger actually needed and the household never did.

Why do dots do that job better than a written description would?

Because a row of dots is built to be read in under a second, and a description is built to be read properly — an app optimising for the first can't also give you the second.

A sitter opening a profile between two other tabs isn't reading a paragraph about his temperament. They're scanning filled shapes against empty ones and moving on. That's a real, useful compression for the app's purpose. It's also the same compression a percentages chart applies to a mixed dog's ancestry — fast to read, and thinner than the thing it's standing in for the moment you look closely.

What's the right way to draw a stack of rating rows like this?

Restrained and evenly spaced, so the dots read as a system rather than as decoration around the portrait.

The silhouette does the work of saying which animal this is; the dots underneath only need to gesture at the shape of an app interface without trying to reproduce one exactly. Two colours are enough — one for the portrait's circle, one shared between the filled and unfilled dots — so the whole thing holds together as a single flat graphic rather than splitting into a picture and a chart bolted underneath it.

Who owns the right to reproduce a rating layout like this?

The layout itself — rows of dots standing in for scored fields — is a common interface convention, not any one company's design; a specific app's actual logo, colour scheme or exact interface chrome is a different matter and would need that company's permission to reproduce.

An invented profile card, drawn in a generic flat-UI style rather than copied from a real product, makes no claim about which app it came from. The same distinction holds for a household's own invented word for the sound he makes versus an actual brand's logotype — one is style, free to use; the other belongs to somebody.

Does this work for more than one animal, or only a single profile?

It scales cleanly to more than one — a second silhouette and a second dot stack, set beside the first, reads as two separate listings rather than crowding one profile with double the ratings.

Each animal in a household usually has their own separate app entry regardless of how the sitting gets arranged in practice, so keeping the profiles visually distinct on the shirt — the way a household of pets sits at its own size rather than forced into one shared scene — matches how the app actually splits them up.

Isn't printing him as rating dots just repeating the flattening the household is annoyed about?

No — the flattening happened when the app wrote the labels. Printing the dots without them is what undoes it, not what repeats it.

A stranger scanning the real profile reads a row of filled dots as a fact about the cat. The household reads the same row and thinks about the actual afternoon that earned it — the one bad week, the reason a row never quite fills all the way. Stripping the words off doesn't make the shirt say less. It makes the dots only readable by people who already know what filled them in.

Does a print with this much flat colour and fine dot work hold up on fabric?

Yes, provided the dots stay large enough to survive the weave rather than shrinking into a blur.

A screen print reproduces a solid silhouette and a filled circle equally well; the only real limit is keeping the smallest dots above the size where fine detail starts filling in on cotton. Two flat inks — a dark charcoal and one saturated accent, teal or a warm rust — on a mid-toned garment like coral or dusty pink give the portrait somewhere to sit forward without a third colour competing for the same small space.

How do I get one made?

Describe him at JustOG — the parts of a real profile worth keeping, and which you'd rather leave off. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Somewhere, an app still has the labels for every one of those dots. The shirt just isn't carrying them.