Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

A friend's son tested postive for COVID-19 the day before my friend was going to pick him up from school, despite his efforts to remain mostly isolated in his dorm room. For the record, it was the exit testing that all students had to take before going home that picked it up, so it did pick that up and perhaps helped his family avoid it. Anyway, I described the situation to a friend who suggested that he might have misread the icon on his thermostat, mistaking a flame for something rounder and spikier. I was amused and said, "I may steal that idea." And thus I have.

I generated all of the icons myself based on references I found online and found a nice 7 segement LED/LCD font and some general purpose, tile-able wallpaper. Even though dorm rooms don't have wallpaper, I wanted to indicate it's on a wall and have something slightly more visually interesting than an all white background. I also didn't want to have to add background elements that would just take time and contribute little. This was all done in Illustrator, fairly quickly. I decided that since it all centers around the thermostat, having humans, in masks, with multiple frames just to get to the visual gag punchline would't really add anything to it and make it look worse and take more time. And quick is the purpose of the Sketchbook Entry of the Day section. This took less than a day to put it all together.

Thanks to Katie for the stealable idea and Matt for the label for the thermostat setting. It was only late in the game that I realized the name I put down 'envirostat' actually had 'viro' in it! Hurray for dumb, pun luck!