Sticker Ideas and Developing

I had many issues with how to approach my stickers as the initial ideas and feedback of what to do were relevant to the theme of the book and its contents but didn't check the box of being something that the target audience/readers would actively want to interact with and share with others as that's the sole purpose of the sticker sheet.

Initial ideas were stickers of furniture/the rooms or stickers based on collected phrases such as with letterpress. I was already noticing the issue of these possibly being too personal to be stickers that every reader would want to engage with. I especially felt this with stickers of furniture/rooms therefore I progressed with collecting more phrases to use for the stickers.

Collected Phrases

I asked peers to give any phrase/thought they had about shared living if they actually were in shared living.

This resulted in quite funny but really niche or personal phrases such as "Put Shewolf on" or "There is no fucking raccoon!" I also could not find any theme of imagery emerging to place these phrases in. 

Based on stickers found in my own living room, I experimented with different possibilities of general shapes or hearts and stars such as 3D fill, abstract fills or holographic vinyl paper. I liked the idea of a basic rectangular shape with the phrase printed onto holographic vinyl paper however when consulting with James in Digital Print, he informed me that the ink would just scratch off really easily on that sort of vinyl.

Logo

When I finally came up with a title for my publication, I experimented with interesting ways of approaching this in an urban/contemporary manner that would be appealing to a creative target audience. This began with trying to draw graffiti inspired type however with just two glyphs it was quite limiting trying to come up with an impactful typeface. The mushrooms were based on the screen printed poster. 

An issue with two glyphs as well is that they would be separate stickers and to fix this I added round borders that eventually connected them.

I then used a typeface I developed before based on chairs in this catalogue as the equal cap-height, and rounded rectangle shapes connote a fun and contemporary personality however when combined I didn't like the outcome at all as it still isn't stickers the target audience would actively want to use and share as confirmed by peer feedback. It felt more as a clothing brand's stickers rather than an engaging one.

Letterpress Logo

I then used the typeface from the letter-pressed bellyband once I created it and placed that within a basic circle as a circle is quite conventional and a more practical sticker. I also create clipping masks of the shape to the previously bitmapped layered images to experiment with how bitmapping would look once printed on transparent vinyl. 

I liked the idea of having bitmapped stickers to remain thematically related to the book but still felt like these stickers were too conventional and boring to be something to be actively engaging with - the idea of a logo or a phrase saying "CO" is too limiting as only the person who has the book would be aware of what "CO" is as it's not a well known brand therefore not everyone would want it.

Moving Forward

I should continue exploring the idea of bitmapped images and printing this on transparent vinyl so that when the sticker is used it would be overlaid on top of objects as the images within the book overlay on top of each other.

I should move away from personal text or logo based ideas and possibly collect or take pictures of more items that would be relatable to students.