Every essay gets a plate.
Instead of stock photos, each essay is filed with its own plate, drawn like an image from the procedure room. The plate is generated from the essay’s own address, so the same essay always gets the same picture, and a new essay gets one the moment it is published. You never have to find an image again.
Four finished plates
Drawn for real essays from the archive
Coming to Terms With Reality
The newest essay. Practice essays get the angiogram family: a branching arterial tree with the catheter riding the main trunk.
The Four Routes to Profitability in IR
Money essays get a fluoroscopy grid, with a guidewire drawn as the data line and the catheter at its end.
The IR Hospitalist: Hospital MVP or Glorified Trash Collector?
The most discussed essay on the site. Same family, different anatomy: no two essays share a tree.
A Framework for Finding Your Ideal First Job
Career essays get a field map, contour lines around a point you are trying to reach, with the catheter finding its way in.
The rules
What makes a plate a Line Monkey plate
- 1
One plate per essay, forever
Each plate is drawn from the essay’s address. It never changes and never repeats, and new essays get theirs automatically.
- 2
Three families, chosen by topic
Angiogram for practice, the state of IR and clinical essays. Fluoro chart for money. Field map for careers and training.
- 3
The catheter is always there
One contrast-red catheter per plate, with its J-tip and a marker band. It is the thread that ties the plates to the scroll line and the wordmark.
- 4
Real annotations
The corners read like an image header: the topic as the series, the essay number, the date, the view and a French size that matches the topic color.
- 5
Film, not flat graphics
Soft vessel edges, film grain and a little lightbox falloff at the edges, so plates feel like images, not icons.
- 6
Negatives in the reading room
In the dark theme every plate flips to bright vessels on black, the way you would window an image.
- 7
No stock, no faces, no logos
Photos are kept for real moments, like you at a podium. Everything else is a plate.
- 8
Hand-finished when it matters
Big essays can get a hand-tuned plate. The automatic one is the default, so publishing never waits on artwork.
Try it
Type any title and its plate appears
The contact sheet
All 77 essays, newest first