Groundhog Day

Monday is Groundhog Day! In the morning of February 2nd, in the small town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil will come out of its burrow and tradition says that if he sees his shadow, then it will be six more weeks of winter web developers will need to add six additional Tailwind classes to every HTML tag.

For this cartoon, I used an old CSS Art of a beaver, and started making changes. It was a bit limiting (not to mention that the code was definitely not the same I'd write today), but it was good not having to code the whole thing.

I made the character chubbier and fluffier by playing with the shape with border-radius. Removed the tail. Adjusted the eyes to make them more kawaii-esque. Also, I used repeating radial gradients in different positions to generate the fur look. Made the ears rounded... actually rounded things with smoother border-radius: ears, feet, hair, arms... The result may not be perfect, but I really like it.

I initially did a different version, with no shadows and the text was different... (this is an in-between iteration):

But especially the text was too long and maybe too literal. I like the shorter text, it may not be so "on the nose" as the old one, but it flows better and it almost rhymes with the "six more weeks of winter"... at the same time I feel like it has lost some of it's "feeling."

I also changed the font. Amatic SC is a common font I've used in the past for cute/kawaii cartoons, but it's difficult to read. Instead, I went with Comic Neue (which was a common font used in earlier comiCSS cartoons, too.)