How to Design and Prepare Custom Stickers

One great thing about being a brand designer is that when designing a company’s brand, not everything needs to be formal or literal. Take stickers as an example. Stickers are a great way for companies to reach a larger audience. They are a unique form of advertising as they have the power to go viral and capture the interest of the audience instantly. They are similar to one-time paid advertisements. Just create it once, and it will stay included under customers’ favorite items like mobile phones, laptops, books, etc.

Companies use custom stickers for various reasons. They either use them for internal promotion (within the organization) or external promotion. Designing a custom sticker may look very simple: create and print design. But getting a successful custom sticker design can be a different story, especially when you are new to the world of marketing with stickers. To design and prepare successful custom stickers, follow these simple steps:

1) Keep it simple:

If you are planning to communicate everything related to the business through stickers, hold your thoughts! You can do that with brochures or leaflets. When it comes to stickers, the design needs to be simple and minimalistic. You cannot stress out your audience to read long statements or figure out the meaning behind the message. Also, people get very little time to look at stickers and read messages. To make it simple and more effective, you can use the logo of the company. In many cases, a company logo can be enough to communicate the desired message or increase brand awareness.

2) Play with shapes:

The best way to get creative with custom stickers is through its shape. Though in sticker design, circles, squares, rectangles are usually the most commonly used shapes, you can play with other different shapes too. But make sure the shape you choose should neither be too small or too big. Otherwise, it may fail to impress the target audience. If you need a more specific shape for your sticker design, then go with the die-cut option.

3) Choose colors that match with a brand:

In design, colors play a significant role. They have the power to communicate the brand message and connect with the emotions of the audience. So choose them wisely! Since the objective of stickers is to create awareness, choose colors that match best with the brand personality. If the brand doesn’t have any specific brand color, then choose the color that perfectly relates to the target audience. For instance, if a brand targets women, then the pink color can be the best and most appropriate color as this color is associated with women. Colors also play a bigger role in the quality of the finished product. To offer a high-quality image, use CMYK format. You can use a Pantone color guide to find out how exactly the color will look on the CMYK format.

4) Make fonts readable:

Ideally, stickers should be designed without text. But if you have planned to add text in the design, then make it super large. Choose the font that can easily be readable from afar and works well with the design theme. Here are a few tips to pick the right fonts for sticker design:

· Avoid using comic sans, impact or papyrus fonts. These fonts are available in everyone’s MS word and may hurt the eyes of the audience.

· Avoid using overly graphic or cursive fonts.

5) Include call-to-action:

We have been taking a lot on how to make stickers more effective. Now it’s time to consider the reason for making so many efforts in designing a sticker-whether you are designing it for brand awareness or campaign promotion or building trust. If you are designing a sticker for increasing brand awareness, then you can add a company’s website address, social icons, and email address as a call-to-action. If you are designing it for any campaign promotion, then apart from the company logo, you can include QR code in the sticker design.

6) Design in high resolution:

Apart from the creativity and unique sticker design ideas, the quality of printing plays a crucial role in creating impressive custom stickers. Since you have put a lot of effort into every one of the above mentioned steps, you don’t want to ruin it just because of bad resolution. Design stickers in high-resolution, so that they come out clear and crisp when the clients get it printed.

7) Set the bleed:

Sometimes stickers look great in digital form, but when they get printed, they look rugged. Why? It is because you didn’t set the bleed. So what is bleed? Well, it is the area that goes a little beyond the trim edges around the sticker. It means when that area gets removed, the whole image remains on the sticker. If the designer doesn’t set that area correctly, chances are part of the image may get deducted by the manufacturer in the process.

Conclusion:

Designing custom stickers doesn’t need to be that difficult. You simply need to understand the objective behind creating them. Follow the above tips and create stunning and impactful stickers that can help businesses in generating a good return on investment.