Happy Year of the Rabbit! Coming directly after the Tumultuous Tiger year, Rabbits are calm and conservative, craving comfort and consolidation. So what better time for a sweet hey?
Every year I like to create a Lunar New Year artwork inspired by an iconic piece of Asian design. For 2022's Year of the Tiger I did a Tiger Balm design. This year, in the Year of the Rabbit, there was only one choice: the iconic White Rabbit brand, instantly recognizable to anyone growing up in an Asian household.
The original design itself is surprisingly complex, featuring graphic elements such as parallel lines, and line gradients, an almost traditional woodcut style repeating border pattern, illustrative elements, and for some reason, a drippy paint thing across the top that screams "why not??" - a sentiment that all graphic designers can be sympathetic to.
In the animated version, I just shifted the border elements a bunny up, which had the happy accident of making it look like they're spinning around to face the bunny behind them Unplanned, but cool!
White Rabbit is definitely having a moment right now, with collaborations across food and beverage with White Rabbit ice cream and Boba Tea, infinite varieties of merchandise, and even cosmetics, with an SK-II rebrand of its top-selling Facial Treatment Essence. And of course, featured prominently across all of these collaborations is the iconic red, white and blue White Rabbit brand design.
Last year I did a pretty simple Tiger Balm inspired post. Possibilities were endless, but I settled on this one because I actually do take Tiger Balm with me wherever I go. And the caption was just dumb enough to make me smile.
Also, fun story: I spent 30 minutes trying to find a similar Chinese font so I could replace the character at the top with the one for 'tiger' before I realized that, yep, it was already 'tiger'. Happy Lunar New Year!
