While on summer vacations and weekend trips, students have the ability to snap pictures of themselves or their surroundings and let their friends know what they are up to with Snapchat geofilters. Seniors Joey Mitchell and Mitchell Norris added something new to Snapchats sent at BVNW by designing and submitting a Snapchat geofilter of a paw print that got approved by Snapchat on Sept. 3.

Geofilters are location-oriented designs that show up in the form of a filter on Snapchat. Users can use the filters based on their location when using the app.

Mitchell said the idea to create the BVNW geofilter came through time spent searching through Snapchat’s website. Once he saw that there was an option to create a geofilter, Mitchell contacted Norris about designing one for the school.

“[The website] gives you steps to take and different guidelines, so we just saw what we couldn’t do and we thought of cool things that we could do for Northwest,” Norris said.

The design process, according to Norris, took about 30 minutes and was completed using Adobe Illustrator.

Norris said that originally, he planned to design a husky, but he ended up going for the paw because it was simple and he thought more people would like it. Norris said that to make the paw more complex, they decided to add some triangle shaped designs.

“We thought a paw would be pretty bad if it was just a paw, so we added some triangle things to make it better,” Norris said.

Mitchell said it was difficult to agree upon things, but they ended up with a balance of things they both liked.

“It was hard to agree on some things like the fonts and whatnot, but [Norris] is pretty good at that so it worked out well,” Mitchell said.

Norris said that it was a pleasant surprise to see it appearunexpectedly on Snapchat while at school Thursday; he said he was surprised when the geofilter got approved because the Snapchat website that he would get an email, but he said he never received one. 

Mitchell said the coolest thing was seeing everyone using the filter when it first got approved.

“The first day that it was up, it was on everyone’s story and everyone was coming up to us and saying that they thought it was really cool,” Mitchell said.