Dash O'Clock: Drawing Dash

Drawing Dash for the Flutter Clock Challenge

Constantin Stan
6 min readFeb 16, 2020

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Dash O’Clock showing 10:10

Flutter announced the Flutter Clock Challenge on the 18th of November 2019. The deadline for submitting the entries for the contest was the 20th of January 2020.

I submitted my entry a few days before the deadline and on 25th of February 2020 - the judgment day it didn’t make it to the top.

There were plenty of gorgeous entries that I’ve seen and liked on Twitter so I didn’t have my hopes too high.

If you’re interested to find out more about the challenge you can do that here.

Why Dash?

My choice of clock face was done somewhere in December when I was researching interesting clock faces that I was capable of creating.

I stumbled upon the Eyeclock designed by Mike Mak:

Eyeclock by Mike Mak

This is quite nice, easy to implement and suitable for the landscape rectangular layout specification of the challenge. So I decided to go on with this concept.

Using Dash was a quite obvious choice considering its the mascot of Dart, the programming language that powers Flutter. Also, it was a choice to set my entry apart, making it a pleasant children theme. The Lenovo Smart Clock is a small cute clock, suitable for a children’s room and its current themes, although are colorful, are generic.

Dash, Dart’s mascot

Also, Dart has some sparkles in its eyes that make them perfect to act as clock handles.

Putting Dash together

I looked around other takes on drawing Dash. I got inspired by some 2D representations.

My goal was to draw Dash by "hand" using simple paths. I used Adobe Animate CC in order to draw Dash as vectors on a fixed size canvas.

I knew that I had to draw the full Dash in order to get it right on other devices not only on the Lenovo Smart Clock.

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