Why it exists
It started with a group of friends who play the daily every evening and compare scores over iMessage. We wanted one image to post when we finished, a way to keep standings without anyone signing up for anything, and a calmer room to play in.
The room
The look comes from the Galleria delle Carte Geografiche in the Vatican, a long corridor of fresco maps painted in the 1580s. Its walls are limewash, its frames gilt, its seas pale azure with names in Latin. The map here borrows all of that: earth-pigment washes for the land, gilt hairlines for the graticule, Pompeian red for answers and scores, and Latin names for the oceans, from Mare Pacificum to Oceanus Æthiopicus.
The name follows the gallery: Galleria delle Genti, the gallery of peoples. ethnogvessr is spelled with a V for the U, as Roman stonecutters carved it. The type is Arno, a face drawn from the humanist printing types of the Italian Renaissance.
The plate you save at the end is meant to look like a printed page from an atlas, not a screenshot.
Credits
| Composites | The faces and group descriptions originate at humanphenotypes.net. |
|---|---|
| Base map | Natural Earth country outlines, by way of Mike Bostock's world-atlas. |
| Type | Arno Pro by Robert Slimbach, served by Adobe Fonts. |
On the faces
Each composite is an average of many photographs. It doesn't describe any individual, and no face tells you where any one person is from. The group names and notes are the source's, shown as they come. The game is about geography and human variation, and it's played for fun.
Privacy
No accounts, no ads, no cookies, no analytics. Your history lives on your devices, and scores shared with friends are end-to-end encrypted. How it works sets out exactly what goes where.