The little blue alien
who notices everything.

Yibnib is small, blue, and entirely his own person.

He arrived in the woodland the way he arrives everywhere — quietly, sideways, and already paying attention to something nobody else had noticed.

He experiences the world differently from most of the people around him. Sounds land harder. Patterns stand out. A room full of conversation can be a great deal to carry.

He is not broken.

Nobody needs to cure him.

The things that make life difficult for him sometimes are the very same things that let him see what everybody else walks straight past.

A lot of what we build for Yibnib comes from a simple observation: the world is loud, and not everybody gets to choose how much of it they take in.

So we made him a place where the volume is his to set.

Spin wheels that turn at exactly the speed you ask them to. Music that loops without surprising you. Colours that move when you want them to and hold still when you don't.

Predictable. Gentle. Yours.

The sensory app grew out of that idea, and it grew slowly, because the whole point was never to add more — it was to make what was already there feel safe.

Yibnib was never meant to be a main character.

He was a small idea that kept turning up in the margins, and eventually the margins became a book.

In The Misadventures of Hightrees and Yibnib, he travels with a large, grumpy, deeply unhelpful companion who thinks he is in charge. Together they cross the Shattered Island, which is exactly as badly named as it sounds.

Yibnib does not save the day by becoming somebody else. He saves it by being exactly who he already was, and by noticing the one thing that mattered.

That felt important enough to write down.

Yibnib is the reason a lot of this exists.

He is the character who taught us that a story can be gentle and still have stakes. That a hero does not have to shout. That the quietest person in the room is often the one who understood it first.

He is also, quietly, a portrait of people we love.

When my son found Yibnib and me on Google Images and walked back out of the room smiling, that was the whole thing, really. That was the point.