Hello, I’m Corinne, and I’ve been design­ing things for an awfully long time. In fact, in 1992 I told my careers guid­ance coun­sel­lor that I wanted to be a Graphic Designer, but they had no idea what that was. More fool them!

In the past I’ve designed explain­ers and infograph­ics for the Government, been a Designer’s designer for a univer­sity, worked with Google and several large medical char­it­ies to help people under­stand complex inform­a­tion, all with a little help from my Master’s in the psycho­logy of design.

That all came to a some­what abrupt end 13 years ago. Now I’m disabled and unable to work in any tradi­tional or steady way. While I have no partic­u­lar diagnosis even after all this time (buy me a pint if you’re inter­ested in that long, confus­ing and sad story), my disab­il­ity means I’m in pain every day, mostly untreated, and every day I deal with crush­ing fatigue.

How does CatBats work, then?

CatBats has an …unusual busi­ness model.

I can’t do all the things a regu­lar employer wants that would keep me employed. I barely know from one hour to the next how much pain I’ll be in, or how exhausted I’m going to be. Reliability is a distant dream. Regular 9am starts feel like trying to climb Mount Everest. All I can do is some­thing small, sporad­ic­ally, with no pres­sure or stress of dead­lines or early morn­ing meetings.

How it all started

After an after­noon last December when things didn’t feel *too* bad and inspir­a­tion just seemed to be flow­ing, a friend posted some really cute pictures of their cats (say hi to our collect­ive mascots, Máni, Sól and Pip!) — and I decided to see how ador­able it would be to turn them into cartoon bats.

Turns out, *really* ador­able†. And that was that.

So here I am, putting myself out there, making some CatBats!

I really hope you’ll like yours.