I stumbled across a graph of the numbers of blue whales in the past century whilst reading the Wikipedia entry on blue whales and whaling (links respectively). This was Christmas Eve at one in the morning and then something clicked, I opened up Inkscape and just started messing around. I was hoping to finish this yesterday, but my dog sadly passed away and didn’t have the mind to touch it again until today.

I enjoyed reading the articles on the blue whale and found it sad that we’ve knocked them down the IUCN Red List all the way to ‘endangered’ in under 70 years of whaling. I hope maybe to see one of these chaps in the wild.

So this is just something to remind people of how quickly we can endanger a species. With whales, we’re even more removed because… well most of us don’t live in the ocean. We’re ‘removed’ from much of what we eat — both meat and vegetables, not to mention synthetic products — so next time you see something on your plate or you’re unwrapping a candy, consider where it is from and if it sounds interesting, consider taking a look.

Personally though, whale-watching is more interesting than visiting a confectionery factory, but that’s just me.

Kind regards,
Pascal

PS. The typeface used in this work is Bodoni ITC, designed originally by Giambattista Bodoni. The digitized Bodoni ITC versions are based on 6, 12 and 72 point originals. For more information online see the ITC website or Wikipedia. I've converted the textual elements to paths since not everyone will have versions of Bodoni installed on their computers.

If anyone is interested, I’ve uploaded the compressed SVG source file for this (SVGz) — please feel free to download it and do whatever you like; the work is in the public domain.

<sup>I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide.

In case this is not legally possible:
I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.</sup>