The Distractonator – 2011 promo

By Ryan

Last year, as some of you may remember, we created the Askatron to celebrate the beginning of 2010. That was a big hit with everyone that was lucky enough to get one in the mail (sorry to those who didn’t). People thought it was funny, so we decided to build that into an ongoing tradition here at Ask designers.

This year we made the Distractonator. It includes about 300 magnetic words and 10 character heads. It’s a simple, but addictive word game type thing that can live on the refrigerator, file cabinet, or skull plate.

After drawing all the heads, and choosing all the words (harder than you might think), we found a printer who could print on magnetic film. They turned out really nicely. The cutting was a different story. Having them all cut by laser was out of the question, as apparently the laser would burn the plastic, releasing arsenic gas or some other similarly potent neurotoxin. I guess our printer is a bit attached to his brain cells, as he then made us an offer to make a traditional die for it. This sounded promising until we received the offer. Let’s just say we didn’t go that direction.

Instead we had them delivered as full, uncut sheets, which we then cut ourselves. It took most of a weekend, but in the end we had about 25 custom made Distractonators ready for the world.

And these are the Distractofied versions of us here at Ask designers! I’m much beardier in real life.

We also made a digital version you can play with. once you make something brilliant, hit the save button, and it will save a copy on our server. If we get any funny ones I’ll post them up here. Go for it!