Watch Koa build herself out of 70 study words

October 18, 2026

Koa the pink koala head made from study words

Blink and you'll miss it: Koa just built herself out of 70 study words. Watch it happen, then take the poster home for free.

Animated: Koa the koala builds itself word by word

Where the idea came from

The spark came from a LinkedIn post by Fahad Mirza, who shared his calligram project: pictures drawn with words instead of lines. The code is open on GitHub: fahad-mirza/calligram_Stata. Go have a look, it's a lovely piece of work. Thank you, Fahad!

Koa saw it and asked the obvious question: could I be made of words too?

How we made our own (in plain words)

We drew the outline. We took Koa's shape (two round ears and a round head) and made a stencil from it. The eyes, nose and smile were cut out, so her face shows up as empty space.
We picked the words. 70 of them, in the three languages Pinkoa speaks: English (study, focus, break), German (lernen, Pause, Lernplan) and Finnish (opiskella, tauko, sisu). The words Koa uses most got the biggest size.
We let the computer play Tetris. A small, free Python tool called wordcloud fills the stencil: biggest words first, then smaller ones in every gap, until the shape is full.
We coloured it Koa-pink and made the animation by adding the words back one at a time, biggest first.

Why build our own instead of using the original? Fahad's tool runs in Stata, a statistics program. We already use Python for Pinkoa's graphics, so we rebuilt the idea there. That also let us use our own font, our pinks, and words in three languages.