If you’re from the south, there’s a good chance that you’ve been to a crawfish boil. If you don’t eat crawfish, we all know you must be a yankee. It’s kind of a big deal down here. When it’s crawfish season, you know about it. It’s so popular that restaurants will start offering crawfish when nothing else on the menu compliments it. The root word for fundraiser is fun–or is it fund?–and this fundraiser I was designing for was all about crawfish. This design below was for the 6th annual Crawfish Bash put on by Forward Student Ministries. At the time, I had just started diddling with animation and had an itchy trigger finger. For no reason at all, I decided to go overboard and animate the main graphic for a social media promo. It’s complete overkill and highly unnecessary…I told you we’re serious about mudbugs!

The main graphic consists of corn, various parts of the crayfish, and pots… that you boil them in. Although potatoes are commonly thrown in the boil as well, visually they look like circles when simplified so I avoided adding them into the mix. I created the main vector in Adobe Illustrator and brought it into After Effects to animate. Besides digital and print, we also design a t-shirt for each Crawfish Bash (like I said, it’s serious!). For this year’s shirt, we ended up going with a slight variation of the color of the design once we picked the shirt, but you can see both ideas below. The shirt featured all of the wonderful synonyms for the crustaceous delicacy. While researching for the design I found some interesting facts about crawdads. Apparently, there are over 600 species of crayfish worldwide…I wonder how many different species I’ve eaten?