Websites can be correct, fast, even beautiful — and still feel a little chilly. So as of this week, the sites of the CARECOM family have residents: Tom, Looka and Qbit, three small mascots that occasionally stroll across the page. Not a banner, nothing that blinks or beeps — more like a cat crossing the living room, simply because it lives there.
The three residents
Tom is a ginger tabby and lives on 3d-spielplatz.de, among 3D models and printing projects. He saunters across the home page, sits down for a moment, glances over at you — and is gone again. Watch closely and you might even catch him mid-stretch.
Looka, an Australian Shepherd in red-tri colours, belongs to bestes-wetter.de — and a herding dog is a natural fit for a site about tours, weather and being outdoors. Looka wags, pants after a fast run, and keeps an eye on the home page as if it were a small flock.
Qbit, finally, is the mascot of CARECOM.united, our cross-site club: a floating, friendly-blinking green “Q”, orbited by a golden electron. No four legs, no fur — Qbit doesn’t walk, Qbit hovers. You’ll meet it on the club pages of the network, right where all member benefits are listed at a glance.
Meet the three — right here
Normally the mascots decide for themselves when to appear — once per visit at most. This post is the exception: on the little stage below they perform on demand. They share the stage, so appearances run one after another — if someone has already booked a performance, your request politely queues up.
Your system asks for reduced motion — the mascots respect that and are staying backstage today.
Restraint is part of the design
Mascots can be annoying — anyone who remembers the office paperclip of the nineties knows that. So Tom, Looka and Qbit live under strict house rules: they appear at most once per visit, only after genuine interaction or a little dwell time, they walk on a pure overlay layer with no click targets, they make no sound, and they leave on their own. And if your system is set to “reduce motion”, there are no appearances at all. Delight, not distraction — house pets included.
For the curious: no GIFs, but skeletons
The three are neither videos nor GIFs. They are drawn procedurally, in real time, onto a transparent canvas: a small skeleton with a spine, four legs with two-bone inverse kinematics, and dedicated tail physics. On top sits one creature module per animal with its anatomy, gait and quirks — Tom blinks and stretches, Looka wags and pants, and Qbit has no walking gear at all: it hovers while its electron circles on a tilted orbit, dimmed behind, bright in front. The shared engine lives exactly once in the common CARECOM foundation; each site only brings its own animal and its runway zones.
So why all this?
Because the CARECOM family belongs together — and that should be something you can feel. Tom, Looka and Qbit are the friendly faces of sites built on the same foundation and connected through CARECOM.united: one free, no-strings membership, valid across the whole network. If you’d like to visit the three at home: Tom lives on 3d-spielplatz.de, Looka on bestes-wetter.de — and Qbit is waiting for you in the club.