Earth Day Sticker Collection

Stickers are meant to be a self contained design, that may or may not relate to something. Slap it on a water bottle, a laptop, the back of a car or your grandmother's lamp in her family room. They're meant to convey a message in a small package. I wanted my stickers to be a collection that several different audiences would say "I want that" while having a fun color palette and be recognizable to almost everyone.

At first I was going to go with butterflies. I sketched a ton and didn't feel like any of them made sense, or really struck me as interesting. Then I thought of a rainy day collection with a girl wrapped in a blanket. I even digitized a few from the sketches I had made. But they were too blah to me. Nothing said "yesss, that's it!" So I moved on and started playing with conspiracy theories and cats. That was a fun concept but I didn't know how to realize my vision and so I had to set it on my "designs for a future date" shelf. Stay tuned for those some day. Honestly it was hard to pin down what exactly I wanted to do with this sticker set.

I was laying in bed one night and and my mind was wondering and then it hit me: pixel art. I shot up and started brain storming ideas. I landed on this fun tree-hugger idea and it just clicked into place. I had what I wanted to do and I ran with it. You can see that I had a couple ideas in mind from my sketches but what I eventually put down in pixels (pun intended) in Illustrator was what became my final stickers.

Pixel art is one of those cool things that never really goes out of style. It's retro, throwback, but not too throwback that it becomes niched. It's recognizable, along with the actual shapes and that's what I wanted to go for. It's also really fun and works well with my color palette. I ended up using the grid tool and making a live paint group with it. It worked surprisingly well.

The sticker that changed the most was this heart. At first I just wanted abstract waves with the color scheme but the feedback I received was that it looked more like camo or an attempt at an aerial view of a garden. So I decided to move away from abstract and find a more concrete idea. The other struggle I was having was the little lines from the grid I used. It took several different things to make sure they weren't visible after exporting to a png or jpg.

I loved the pink in the first one though so I decided to add a little pink heart, which ties it in nicely to the tree sticker and the wording. The heart is supposed to be the earth, the idea is that it is encapsulating it with love.

These stickers are recognizable by everyone who sees them. It's a message we all can relate to, and in a style that resonates with most people. I showed them to a friend who immediately said "I want that!" and I think my job is complete. They work as a collection or as separate stand alone stickers. They are fun and they were fun to make.