I have been creating, editing, scrapping, and recreating three different stickers for the past couple of weeks. From the beginning, I wanted the theme of my stickers to be about winter sports. I eventually came up with three different designs, as well as various color schemes for two out of the three stickers. My goal for this project was to create stickers that would appeal to winter sport athletes.
I went through a few design changes during these past couple of weeks. Although my final designs are very different from my original sketches, I have definitely noticed the benefit of the sketching process and how it helps me to get from point A to point B. For example, I originally planned on designing ski goggles with a reflection of the mountains, and a ski equipment snowflake, but as I started to bring my designs to life in Adobe Illustrator, I ran into some issues.
The snowflake was my first issue. The ski equipment element, which I would argue is the most important element, was not clear to my audience. Not only was the message unclear, but visually it was too small and noisy.
The snowflake concept ended up taking a left turn and I started coming up with the idea of combining summer treats and winter sports. I plan on creating an ice cream and skiing sticker in the future, but for now, I have a snow cone with a snowboard. The comments I received on this draft were very useful in creating my final version. Instead of having "Burton" on the straw to indicate that it is also a snowboard, I could use bindings to make it look like an authentic board. Something else I needed to adjust was each end of the ribbon. The abrupt ending looked funky and not realistic.
For my snowboarder, I had issues with shape and spacing. My colleagues were able to give me critiques on tension points and tangents. Even though the tree shaped version of my snowboarder was a fun shape, I did not like it. So, after many alterations and edits, I was able to make a sticker that I believe has an interesting shape and doesn't cause my audience to feel anxious.
When I started this project, I wasn't aware of all the ski goggle sticker/vector art available to choose from. This, along with having trouble coming up with a better shape for my goggle strap, I ultimately decided to scrap that idea and try to create using words to help with my visuals. I started out with a mountain in mind, but as I played around with shapes and alignment, I realized that a beanie would work perfectly.
One of the most important criteria for making this project was, would I place these stickers on my personal belongings? As a skier, I do not normally think about slapping snowboarding stickers on any of my possessions, but I am happy with what I have designed and I would gladly display them. I still have a great deal to learn and improve on, but I'm going to take it one sticker at a time.
