How to open a Zootopian DMV

Last weekend, I was checking out the Disney Zootopia Twitter feed when I noticed these awesome Zootopian driver’s licenses that were distributed as part of a promotional press kit to members of the media. For example:

So, this happened.😂👏🏻🙏🏻 #Zootopia pic.twitter.com/mCPMz3Rm9u

— Chris Rackliffe (@crackliffe) March 10, 2016

Absolutely brilliant idea for a press kit, and I really hope it’s only a matter of time before they make them available either digitally (like the Gazelle page) or for physical purchase in the Disney Personalisation shop. Meanwhile, I spent about an hour putting my own version together  in Keynote, mostly based on the official design but taking some liberties with it because I couldn’t exactly match the fonts online or find a full Department of Mammal Vehicles logo.

Here’s my Zootopian license in all its unofficial glory:

@ByronPHoward @_rich_moore running an unofficial DMV till official licenses are available 😉 https://t.co/qFIVQNlYeA pic.twitter.com/NtYO7DzNSg

— Vanessa Moss (@cosmicpudding) April 6, 2016

Since I’d put some effort into making a license template, I thought it would be nice to make licenses available to other Zootopian fans while we wait for an official version to be released. I commented on the original license post, tweeted a link to the awesome directors of Zootopia, Rich Moore and Byron Howard, and also posted on both the official Zootopia Facebook page and the Zootopians community page.

About a day passed, and there were only a few takers, which was kind of what I expected really. I had made a Google form to take in the license details of applicants, which automatically fed into a spreadsheet from which I’d take the details and update a Keynote template file. I haven’t had time to check the data more carefully, but I think two things happened.

1) An adorable rescue bunny named Miss Bunz tweeted about the license she’d gotten:

Spent all day at the DMV but now I'm official! Thanks to .@cosmicpudding and her team of sloths! #Zootopia #Disney pic.twitter.com/VNtdM2Ezbs

— Miss Bunz (@Ms_Bunzita) April 6, 2016

2) The Zootopians community page highlighted my post (although they’ve since edited it because of what I’ll get to now!)

I perhaps kind of forgot that while I was going to sleep in Australia, having happily sent out 15 licenses to people before doing so, that the United States and Europe were only just waking up. Randomly I woke up at about 5am AEST, and was surprised to see that license requests had suddenly jumped an order of magnitude to about 180! What was slightly scarier (I’m an astronomer and exponential growth terrifies me) was that the spreadsheet requests jumped to over 200 in about 15 minutes while I watched.

So! That brings me to this post. You’re probably wondering why I didn’t release a template from the start, to save having to actually do anything myself. I was worried that Disney might get angry at me for doing so, even though I was only doing it for fun and to help share the joy with other Zootopian fans. But obviously now it’s at a point where I can’t keep up with the demand (until I figure out a way to Pythonise it), so I’m releasing a template now (please don’t be mad at me, Disney!).

Here it is! Sorry for the delay, Australian time isn’t really aligned with the rest of the world too well. Below the template, you can find a small guide to fonts if you want to try and closely match mine but I’d say go for whatever you think looks good 🙂 If you feel like sharing your license, post it on the Zootopians FB post or tweet at me, I’d love to see them! I’d appreciate it lots if you keep the credits to me on the template ^_^

Update: it was pointed out to me that technically the type should be “predator” or “prey” rather than “mammal” (which makes sense since Zootopia is seemingly all mammals!). I based the license on the official Disney version, but I’m adding two additional templates here in case you want to follow that logic: predator and prey.

Guideline to fonts:

Note: for license number consistency, I worked with 8-digit numbers (no letters) to make a “pawprint” number with the Animal Tracks font and I used the letters “o” for 0 and “g” for 9. Feel free to match or do your own thing! Also, you can find the Texta Alt font here. I also matched a pawprint from the Animal Tracks font to the mammal chosen by the license applicant, and put that next to their name.

For anyone who put in a request to the Google form before I closed it, I will definitely get your licenses to you as soon as I can. If I can automate the system, I might open it again for submissions in future if you don’t want to use the template I’ve put here 🙂 Stay tuned! 🐰