For a package design course, our assignment was to create a green, eco-friendly cleaning product. My classmate, Justin Bernardy and I were initially going to go the standard minimal and elegant look like many of these boutique-type cleaners. Jokingly we thought to do a something on the extreme end, sort of like how Liquid Death took something as innocuous as water and made it "metal." When using ChatGPT to generate some ideas for names, Justin asked for the bot to come up with some names for a "heavy metal" cleaning product. When one of the suggestions was Grime Reaper (a play on Grim Reaper), we thought it was too good to pass up. So we began our mission.
I drew our logo in Procreate. We decided on black and green for our color scheme. The green for us connected with the word grime and made us think of slime. The slime motif would be used throughout the packaging. We came up with copy and tongue-in-cheek taglines touting the brutality of our product's cleaning power. It's deadly to bacteria but safe for you and your family. The other benefits we wanted to emphasize were the company's mission to clean the environment. Proceeds of Grime Reaper would be donated to local and global clean-up efforts to help fight pollution and make the world a greener, cleaner place.
The class responded well to our product. It helped to zig when everyone else zagged on this one. While this idea may be irreverent and doesn't take itself too seriously, Justin and I were seriously into working on this. It was a lot of fun being able to inject some humor into something that is normally kind of haughty. To take this a step further, for our environmental graphics course I designed a Grime Reaper trade show booth that resembles a funeral. It's the end of germs as we know it, the Grime Reaper spares none.
