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The Beginning

The story of Ruthinkk starts in 2018. We’re at the end of my first school year as a computer scientist. We’re done with the year’s program, so we get to have an introduction to Photoshop. The final exercise of the course consists of creating a little character with foods we like. At this point in time, I’m using Discord a lot, and they have Twemoji’s emojis. It’s also at this time that the “meme” version of “Thinking” or “Thinking Face” gets popular, it looks like this: , I know it as “Thinkk”, although it’s also commonly known as “Thonk”. I create a recreation of this, and name it after the “Thinkk” emoji, appending the first letters of my name to it, and there we have it, “Ruthinkk” was born: .

Ruthinkk’s food elements

Its body is a potato, its mouth is a sausage, its eyebrows are dates, its eyes are made out of chocolate cream, its hairs are made out of chocolate mousse, and of course, the hands, or fingers, are fries.

The middle

At first, Ruthinkk wasn’t a perfect square, and so for years I was sad I had lost the Photoshop file, but yippee, I had not lost it, giving me the opportunity to make it a perfect square! Woo!
Honestly, that’s all that happened for years related to Ruthinkk. Until one day I decided to make a version that’s way smaller in file size thanks to being made with as a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file. Sadly, this wasn’t possible without losing a lot of detail, so I decided to put the idea off.

Lottie

Discord then added the new Stickers, that could be made using this new popular image file format called Lottie. I decided to check out the requirements to make a Lottie image. But at first, you needed some really specific apps to create animated Lottie files, like Adobe After Effects, and I was lazy to learn how to use them just to make an animated Ruthinkk.
Close to the end of 2022, Lottie announced a Lottie editor that was free to use and actually also really simple to use, but I had to wait for the public version to come out. So I did.

Ruthinkking Ruthinkk

But first, RuthinkkButLottie

In about an afternoon, I got on LottieLab, the said editor, and made a version of Ruthinkk that wasn’t animated, but way smaller. It didn’t look exactly like it, and it was a gif, so not great. (this is a small version with a background because I don’t want it to take too much space on my host).

Then, Ruthinkking Ruthinkk

I then imported Ruthinkk on the LottieLab editor and recreated each element on it, and then got to the editing part, which took a while, but wasn’t hard at all. I went through a few versions. One of them wasn’t well colored, one of them was better colored but still not perfect, and then, I made this one: (it’s animated!).

Final version

The last one I just showed was supposed to be the last version, but I decided to work on the exact same one, except it would be more rounded. This led to the actual final version (until I decide to make a new one…), which is this one:

There we have it

I finally have a version of Ruthinkk that’s actually thinking. Yay.