[picture] Designing a Sticker Sheet

A long time ago, I designed a sticker pack for Telegram and Whatsapp, that was made up of main and background characters of my sketches. I gave them all a coherent color palette made up from 12 or 13 colors and sketched them in an iPad, that I had back then. All with the same line weight and a similar look. The result was a sticker pack that looked like it was designed like this in the first place (in my opinion hehehe), and not copied together from several sketches I did over a period of 3 or 4 years. The stickers looked like this:

I rediscovered the tiny (512 x 512 px) files recently in my Telegram download folder and decided, that I want to turn them into a physical sticker sheet. I thought about making it approximately post card sized, so I can ship them around and cram them into a C6 envelope.

Because of the tiny resolution of the png files (the original sketched were done with Procreate and I sold my iPad, so couldn’t open those files anymore), I converted them to vector graphics first and then spent the longest time ever on cleaning up and polishing the outlines. I also adapted the color scheme once again and then selected the stickers I liked the most.

I arranged the stickers on a 10×15 cm sheet in Inkscape and then realized, that I not only want to have a blank sticker sheet, but something with a proper design. So using the same color palette, I added a background and a title design to the sheet and rearranged the individual stickers. So the result looked like this:

The magenta lines were added later, for the print shop. They are indicating where the cuts are supposed to go. I also needed to change the whole thing as a CMYK colorspaced file and as in PDF X-3 format, to get them printed.

After sending everything to the online print shop and about a week of waiting, UPS delivered a little package to me.

I am really happy how they came out. Exactly like I imagined them. For future projects though, I would make the font of the stickers a tiny bit bigger.

One thing I noticed, was that the black lines were not as crisp on other stickers, I designed before and printed via another service. I guess they use a different method or something. The difference is really obvious. Below there is an old sticker and the new one, photographed from the same distance and angle.

Luckily everything is still readable and from already a few centimeters away, the lines are looking rather sharp again.

As you maybe saw further up, I published the whole sticker sheet under the CC0-Licence. That means you can download the file and print it, manipulate it and do whatever you want with it, via the button below.

The zip file contains the original svg, I made with cutting path, single grouped sticker etc., the pdf that was sent to the print shop and also the original 512 x 512 px files I discovered in my Telegram download folder.