A circle wider than the gap it has to pass through

A doorway, seen from directly above. Two hard lines mark the opening. A perfect circle crosses it — and the circle is plainly wider than the gap. Along both door edges, eleven short scuff marks show where it has struck, some faint, some heavier. No text. No measurements.

The house didn't change size. Something moving through it did.

Why draw this as a plan view instead of a picture of the dog?

Because the problem is entirely spatial, and a plan view is the one angle that shows spatial problems without anything else competing for attention.

Seen from above, a doorway is just two lines and a gap, and a cone is just a circle. Nothing about temperament, expression or how anyone feels about wearing it enters the frame — there's no dog in the drawing at all. What's left is the actual mechanism: one shape, one gap, and the arithmetic of whether the first fits through the second.

Why is the circle drawn wider than the opening?

Because that's the whole argument, stated as a measurement rather than a story.

A cone is sized to the animal's neck, not to the doorways of whatever house it happens to live in. Nobody measures a doorway before buying one. The mismatch between "wide enough to do its job" and "narrow enough to clear every gap in this floor plan" isn't a design flaw in the cone — it's two completely different constraints that were never going to line up, and drawing the circle visibly oversized is the fastest way to show that without a caption.

What do the eleven scuff marks actually record?

Every point of contact between the circle and the frame, logged the way a doorframe naturally logs anything that hits it repeatedly.

Heavier marks mean more force or more repetitions at that spot; lighter ones mean a glancing hit. Together they're a rough map of which routes through the house get taken most, since the same doorway gets struck again on every pass. Nobody drew this map on purpose — the frame accumulated it the way any part of a house does, the same passive record a front door keeps in its own chipped paint, just laid down in weeks instead of decades.

Does the house actually have to change to fix this?

That's not a question this piece answers — it's drawing what happened during one period, not recommending a fix for it.

Some households widen a route, some just live with the marks until the cone comes off; which one makes sense depends on the house, the animal and how long the period lasts, and none of that is visible from a plan view. What the diagram states plainly is the geometry: a shape that didn't used to collide with anything started colliding with things, in roughly the same span of days a printed line was asking the animal to stay still and it kept moving regardless.

Does a doorframe's scuff marks belong to anyone?

No — marks left on paint by ordinary contact aren't a design anyone owns; they're wear, the same category as a scratch on a floor.

What would need permission is reproducing somebody else's actual door — its specific mouldings, its particular colour, a maker's hardware. A generic doorway drawn as two lines and a gap, the way any architectural plan draws one, carries none of that. It's a shape, not a portrait of a real door.

Does the geometry only apply to a cone?

No — anything rigid strapped to a soft, moving body runs into the same arithmetic: a splint, a bulky wrap, a protective boot with a stiff cuff.

What changes is the shape doing the colliding, not the underlying problem. A plan view drawn around any of those objects works the same way — two fixed lines for the gap, one oversized shape crossing it, and however many scuff marks the frame actually collected during that stretch. It's the same category of mismatch as an animal moving one way in a familiar room and a different way somewhere strange — a body doing something the surroundings weren't built to expect.

Does it print well?

Yes — flat technical line work with no shading is close to the easiest structure this site reproduces, provided the two hard lines and the circle stay crisp rather than sketchy.

Keep the doorway lines and the circle's outline the same weight so neither reads as more important than the other — the whole point is that they're two independent facts meeting by accident. The scuff marks should stay small and varied in density rather than uniform; even, regular marks would read as decoration instead of a record.

How do I get one made?

Describe the doorway at JustOG — how wide the gap was, and roughly how it went. 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.

Eleven marks on one frame, and the paint underneath them hasn't been touched up yet.