Five identical mornings on the same step

One doorway, drawn five times in a row. Same door, same step, same handle, same chip in the paint, repeated exactly each time. A single child's silhouette stands on the step in every version, same pose throughout, a little taller in each — by the fifth drawing the head clears the letterbox it sat well below in the first.

Nothing in the frame changes except the one thing that was never going to hold still.

Why does everything except the child have to stay exactly the same?

Because holding the background constant is what makes the one real variable legible.

If the door, the step or the angle shifted between drawings, a taller silhouette could just mean a different photograph, taken from a different spot. Fix everything else — same handle, same crack in the same place — and there's only one thing left that could account for the difference. The design's whole argument depends on the doorway being boring five times over.

What is the letterbox actually doing in this design?

It's an accidental ruler, fixed to the door at the same height every year without ever being meant as one.

Nobody put it there to measure a child against. It just happens to sit at a height a small child starts below and eventually stands level with, then above — which makes it the one part of the drawing a viewer can use to judge the gap between the first year and the last without needing a caption to explain it.

When does a repeated photograph like this turn into a record rather than a habit?

Usually not until the third year, once there's enough of a run to show a trend rather than one photograph and a difference.

The first year is just a photograph. The second gives you two points, which could be almost anything. It's the third and fourth that make the pattern impossible to read any other way — a jumper bought a size ahead makes a similar case with a single comparison; this design needs the whole run.

Do you need permission to use your own doorway photograph like this?

No — a photograph you took yourself, of your own front door, is already yours, with nothing to license and nobody to ask.

That's the easier case. A studio portrait taken by someone else is licensed to a family as a print, and putting it on a garment is a further use that usually needs asking. A doorway you photographed on your own step avoids that question entirely, which is part of why it works so well as a repeating design rather than a one-off.

How is this different from a shirt marking the first day at a specific school?

That's a different design built around a different moment — the building itself and the year a child started there, printed once.

This one isn't about the first day, or the building, or even really about school. It's about a doorway repeated on purpose, year after year, so that a slow change becomes visible. The two designs could sit on the same child and cover different ground entirely.

Isn't five drawings of one door just one drawing repeated four times?

Not once the silhouette changes — the repetition is the control, not the content.

A single drawing of the doorway is a picture of a door. Five, with the same pose held at a different height each time, is a measurement disguised as a picture of a door. The sameness of everything around the child is what turns the growing figure from decoration into data.

Does it print well?

Yes — flat two-value silhouettes with hard outlines hold their edges at any size, which matters here because there are five small drawings doing the work of one large one.

Keep the chipped paint and the letterbox identical in shape and position across all five doorways; any drift between them undermines the whole point of the design. One ink for the doorway line work and one for the silhouettes is enough — resist adding colour, which would draw the eye away from the height comparison the design exists to make.

How do I get one made?

Send five photographs of the same doorway at JustOG — one per year, same angle if you have it. 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.

The letterbox hasn't moved. Everything below it has.