Design Ideas and Design Process
Sticker 1: For my first sticker, I decided to incorporate a modernist style using geometric shapes, lines, and bold writing. One of my postcards was what inspired me to create this sticker as I felt the modern traits helped draw attention to the text and I thought they made the overall design generally more eye-catching and interesting. Whilst I knew I wanted to create a modern sticker; I wasn’t entirely sure how to create it. To help gain ideas, I sketched out specific letters that I would include, and I illustrated around them until I found a look which I liked, and thought worked well for the overall style. I also experimented around on illustrator with font sizes and colours before finally settling on black, white, and grey tones. This design helped me a lot with regards to getting my bearings in illustrator, and learning about how it works generally speaking.
Sticker 2: For my second sticker, I chose to create it with a softer, more artistic and creative feeling. To achieve this, I planned on writing out the text and then adding illustrations such as soft shapes and patters which would flow from it. Whilst I wanted to stick with this plan fully, I ended up changing a few things along the way. Instead of leaving the inside of the sticker plain white to help draw attention to the illustrations merged with the text, I chose to fill in the sticker with a grey tone that gets darker the further away it gets from the centre. This made the sticker feel almost like a metal plaque. Whilst it didn’t go entirely to plan, I feel like this design was successful at helping me develop my skills and knowledge of illustrator. I also managed to add a boarder to it which helped make it look more like a sticker.
Sticker 3: My third sticker was easily my least favourite and successful. This was because my design didn’t go to plan at all and so much changed along the way. In the beginning I was planning on manually adding the text to the sticker using the brush tool as I wanted to make another artistic looking sticker, as well as wanting to explore the brush tool and what it has to offer to help me develop my skills. This proved unsuccessful as it was very hard to manually add the text without it looking messy and poorly made. To make up for this, I used a font called ‘sign painter- house script’. This looked like it had been painted as the letters seemed to flow more smoothly. I then used the paintbrush tool to add splashes of paint to the ends of letters, making them look like they had been messily painted on, without making the whole sticker look messy. The one issue I encountered however was that the whole sticker looked rather boring. To solve this issue, I added ink splatters in some of the empty areas. Whilst the design wasn’t as nice as I thought it would be, I think it definitely helped me develop my skills as I managed to explore the die cutting feature more, and I also got the chance to explore the brush options. Not only that but I also figured out how the edit the control panels, giving me the chance to add and subtract the more important tools which I needed.
Paint experiments
Software Tutorials
Sticker 1: When creating my first sticker, I used a few software tutorials to help me figure out how to die cut my sticker. I also watched two YouTube tutorials to help me merge layers and shapes so that I could die-cut them. Whilst I was able to merge the layers together, the die-cutting was not as successful as the sticker was made of multiple shapes and even though I merged them, they were still seen as individual shapes when I tried creating a 0.5pt boarder.
The video I watched to help me merge shapes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwEGB4YVe-c
The video I watched to learn how to die cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqQqEJ-HtC8
Sticker 2: In order to successfully die-cut my second sticker, I used the same tutorial as I did for my last sticker. The die-cutting process was much more successful in this sticker than it was in the last one as the whole sticker was based on a single shape. I also watched a YouTube tutorial and looked at the adobe website when making this so that I could work out how to make my brush strokes smoother so that my illustrations appear more professionally done. Not only this but I also looked at the adobe website for help on how to create a gradient colour blur within my sticker.
Link to adobe website: https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/illustrator/using/gradients.html
Sticker 3: Whilst my third sticker was definitely my least favourite and most unsuccessful, I gained quite a few new skills from it including how to find and change different brush settings, how to alter the control panels, and how to make a more effective looking die-cut border. To do this, I watched a YouTube tutorial explaining how to find the different brush settings and how to use them. I learned how to manipulate the control panels simply through experimenting and exploring illustrator. Finally, when it came to die-cutting, I simply watched the same video from before, and then experimented further.
Brush tool video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P4-QIj0B2o
Resources for Research and Inspiration
Sticker 1: Two large inspirations for my first sticker were the modernist movement and Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, specifically, his painting ‘Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray’. I loved the painting because of the bold colours and blocky modernist layout. Whilst I wanted to make a sticker like this, I also didn’t want colour to distract from the text as that is the most important part of it. Because of this, I chose to make all of the shapes black and white and grey. My second source of inspiration is hard to explain, however it was essentially the faded lines you see in architectural sketches that are used for accuracy. I liked how the lines made architectural sketches look technical and industrial, yet still creative. I chose to incorporate this into my text, as if the text is something which was designed and planned before being manufactured.
Sticker 2: When coming up with the design for my second sticker, I knew I wanted to create one which looked more artistic and creative, and I also knew I wanted to merge my text with illustrations. In order to gain inspiration on how to illustrate my text, I created a mood board featuring a variety of images of text and letters with patters and shapes and visuals flowing from them. Some images were of old or old styled letters and some were clearly contemporary. Whilst I originally liked the idea of my text being heavily mixed with lots of visuals, I ended up simply decorating it with shapes and patters which flower from it as I found it was quite difficult to create my idea on illustrator. It also ended up looking quite messy. After creating my text, I decided to fill in the whole sticker with grey and I chose to make the grey fade as you look towards the centre. This made my sticker look like a metallic plaque which I actually quite liked. In order to then expand on this idea, I smoothened out the edge of the sticker.
Illustrated letters mood board
Sticker 3: My third and final sticker was heavily inspired by what I wanted my second sticker to be like. I intended on it looking messy but in a controlled and intentional way to make it appear more creative and artistic. I wanted the text to look like it had been painted onto the sticker using oil paint. I was somewhat inspired by the logo for the show ‘art attack’ as it looks like the text has been splattered onto the logo. After this idea fell through, I decided to use ink platters instead in an attempt to bring back the artistic theme. This worked somewhat however the whole sticker looks messy.
