Looking back at what I did with Analyst Clay, I'm pretty ashamed of my work. I know that working with something as ambiguous as Analyst Clay was pretty difficult, but if I were a graphic designer trying to create something for a real company called Analyst Clay, the logo I created was a real turd.

Fortunately for me, the Random Word Generating gods were much friendlier with this go around and gave me Self Scrape. There were two things that immediately jumped to mind with this project: some sort of razor or that stuff you put on your windshield to defrost the ice in the middle of winter. The razor route seemed pretty difficult to pull off, so I went with the windshield defroster.

Coincidentally, Aaron Draplin (in conjunction with Lost Type) released his very first font this week: DDC Hardware. I'm a huge, huge fan of Draplin's work. You might recall that I even focused my first Artist Spotlight on him. Do yourself a favor and check out this page promoting the new font. I'll show just a few screenshots below.





He does some amazing stuff. Every time I see that Redwing Farms logo, I can't help but be blow away by it. Draplin has an eye for clean, nostalgic looks. Stuff that really exudes the Midwest life.

That all said, this week's challenge is definitely in honor of Aaron Draplin. It uses his new DDC Hardware font, attempts to go for that simple Midwestern look, and even uses the colors on the DDC Hardware site. The shot below will show you that. One of the first things I did was used the eyedropper tool to pull out all the colors used in the graphic below. With the exception of the brown used on the mitt, everything else is copied from Draplin.


Okay, so moving on, I knew I wanted to create something that could be slapped on an antifreeze-like bottle, so that's exactly what I did. A quick search in the ol' Google Images repository spit out this guy below.


My plan was to use the Pen tool to just trace this guy and use him as the basis for my illustration. And actually, I did start to go down that route. The problem was that things weren't all that symmetrical. Okay, seriously, if you look at the tracing below, you probably won't notice a difference between the tracing and what I ultimately created from scratch, but I did. And other serious designers would, too. If I want to make up for where I got lazy with Analyst Clay, I can't overlook these tiny things.


I don't have any other screenshots of me placing the text on the bottle, but you can probably guess that was pretty simple. The only remaining complex piece of this illustration was the mitt itself. Again using my pal, Google Images, I found this ice scraper mitt that looked much like the one my parents owned as I grew up.


Again concerned with symmetry, I didn't even bother tracing this one at all. Instead, I just placed it in Illustrator as a means to eyeball it and created the mitt from scratch. The body of the mitt is just a sheared rectangle, the base a rounded rectangle, and the top a rectangle that was Pathfindered out using a couple of curved lines. Knowing Draplin uses a lot of thick lines in his work, I set the stroke of everything pretty high on purpose. (And also made the body of the mitt that trademark DDC orange.)


And... that's really it. Throw the mitt on top of the bottle, resize everything appropriately, and viola: you get the final product seen at the top. While not overly difficult, I did spend a fair amount more time on this one than Analyst Clay. I'm glad I did so because I'm much more proud of this one than Analyst Clay. Ugh. I still shudder at the thought of that one.

Hope you enjoyed this post! Catch you in the next one.