'Imogen Quest' Creator Olivia Walch's Squigglish App Livens Up Doodles With Math

by Caleb Goellner

March 18, 2017

Upcoming GoComics creator Olivia Walch of Imogen Quest isn't just making the world a funnier place with her weekly webcomic -- she's also making it a squigglier place with a free new app.

Squigglish!, the new iOS (Android coming soon) app by Walch, lets any artist transform their drawings into lively animated GIF or video files. Users can start from scratch or upload photos and add squiggly signage.

Walch built the app based on a code she'd developed with Ph.D. student Matt Jacobs during a previously attended hackathon. If it looks familiar to fans of Home Movies and other Squigglevision cartoons, it should. The patented animation technique that made Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, Science Court and other shows so memorable helped inspire the look. The technique, however? It's a whole different thing. So different, we leave it to Dr. Walch to explain.

Walch broke it down in an interview with The Verge:

“Essential tremor is a condition where one of the symptoms is wobbly handwriting. Once we got that code running, we realized we could go the other direction, and adapt our code to introduce tremor into line drawings. For Squigglish, I’m messing with the higher frequencies in the signal, to increase their overall strength by some random amount.This adds the wiggle you see in the lines!”

Squigglish isn't Walch's first app, either. She launched Sketch Anything, an app that breaks down complex images into their fundamental shapes and walks users through how to recreate them, around this time last year.

Imogen Quest debuts on March 27th here on GoComics, giving you plenty of time to get app-quainted with her coding work beforehand.