- Catalog
- AI
- Design
On March 29 the Body Part Atlas was renamed the Phenotype Atlas and given its own landing page. The page describes the core trait categories in anatomical terms: eye morphology, nasal structure, lip form, hair texture, skin pigmentation and body composition.
The same day every group page was reframed as a phenotype profile. A phenotype is the set of traits you can observe, and each page now reads as a reference for them.
The homepage was rewritten around an AI creator community, and navigation settled into four sections: Create, Atlas, Explore and Community. The Phenotype Atlas now sits at the center of the site.
Under the hood
- The landing page is generated from the trait catalog itself: it lists each distinct phenotype category with a description and a representative image.
- Eye morphology is defined by lid structure, epicanthic folds, orbital shape and pigmentation; nasal structure by bridge height, alar width, tip projection and nostril shape.
- Hair is described by strand cross-section, curl pattern, density and pigmentation; skin by melanin distribution, undertone and the Fitzpatrick scale; body composition by skeletal proportions, fat distribution and somatotype.
- Navigation is organized into four top-level sections, and the homepage leads with people cards and photo-backed feature cards drawn from the atlas.
- top-level sections
- 4
See it on the site
Sources and open data
Related build notes
- Dec 30, 2025A hand-built world atlas, rebuilt from the ground upThe atlas of the world's peoples, first coded in 2021, moves to a modern stack with a Body Atlas, member boards and an AI portrait wizard built in.
- Aug 28, 2026Trait pages measure hair, eyes, skin and face from real portraits"Egyptian eyes" draws about 9,900 US searches a month. Trait pages answer questions like it with distributions measured from real portraits.
- Sep 6, 2026The authoring engine: 10,837 entities, one rubric, 253 new pagesA Wikidata harvest, a written rubric and a four-step pipeline published 253 new peoples pages in one day, from the Mosuo to the Hidatsa to the Tzotzil.