I made telegram stickers with Midjourney
Our story begins with…
A subscription of Midjourney, an AI program for generating images. I was quite lucky to get access to it in my organisation. Unfortunately, the luck ends there because Midjourney hasn’t exactly been a home run for UX Designers like me. Sure, it has its uses here and there, but it hasn’t led me to skiving at work yet.
Meanwhile, the looming problem we have with Midjourney here is that if there is no Return on Investment, funding is probably going to get discontinued. I like Midjourney and would love to keep it, but it’s not needed if we don’t create any value with it. So I made it a point to add this question into my Work Decision Tree — “Can it be done on Midjourney?”.
As fate might have it…
One of my colleagues wanted to make swag for the organisation and reached out to me to work on it. Having what we call in Singapore the itchy-backside-syndrome, I agreed. I went through my trusty workflow, realised we could potentially use Midjourney, had a beer, and spat it right out because I can’t stand the taste of beer. Who even wrote th — wait a second — ChatGPT, did you put stuff in my Work Decision Trees again?
And so, the plot thickens…
So here we are. Documenting my journey in the middle of my Midjourney experiments. We realised Midjourney could make amazing sticker swag that could also serve to bring our community closer together. But to make these stickers work, they’d have to be relatable.
Thus we did what no one else would ever do — extort our boss for quotes that we’ll use for the stickers.
He proceeded to give me so many quotes over the next few days, I felt bad/good because it seemed like I was giving him work to do. Oh yeah.
From time to time, I received quotes which were uncannily timely. Like my boss was telling me something. I… started questioning my sanity. Was he omniscient? Or was he somehow spying on me? 😂 Perhaps a story for another day.
Where secrets come to light…
Now, here’s what you might be here for, a step-by-step guide to how I made telegram stickers with Midjourney as my artist.
Step 1: Pick quotes and think of images that might best fit the quotes. All we need here is a little imagination for Midjourney to fart you a rainbow.
Step 2: We wanted cute-looking stickers, so our prompts generally look like “kawaii otter, road to hell, sticker, vector, white background, contour, cartoon style”.
Step 3: You’ll have to generate more options if there isn’t a good match. This isn’t tinder, so you can’t just keep swiping right. Once you see what you want, upscale the chosen option and download it. Usually the image will be about 1024px x 1024px in size.
Step 4: Remove the white background so the image becomes transparent. I did this with photoshop using the Magic Wand Tool. If you don’t have photoshop… try robbing an Adobe store. Or Google for an alternative method. One of the options is less illegal when you do it right.
Step 5: Now it’s time to add the quote to the image. The text needs to be a slight distance away from the bottom (about 1/10th of the artboard), otherwise the timestamps on telegram can cover the words when the sticker is sent. You’ll need a little bit of ol’ school trial n’ error for this.
Step 6: On the original image layer, add white strokes to your image. In photoshop, go to layer > layer style > stroke > size 15 (up to you), position outside, colour white. Looks good, amirite 🔪🔪🔪?
Step 7: Export out the image as .png at 50% of the size so that now it’s 512px x 512px. Telegram wants what it wants. It’s not my choice.
Step 8: Upload it into telegram as a sticker and share it with everyone. You’re now everyone’s favourite person in the world for a good whole minute!
Step 9: (Optional) You can even print this as a sticker if you know of a place that does die cut stickers.
Happily ever after… Or not.
After making about 10 stickers, we started sharing the stickers to teammates and it garnered a little bit of interest. It was probably the quotes that caught their intrigue, but I’d still take the positive reaction any day.
So we got some worth out of Midjourney — hurrah! That should serve as “value created” for awhile. Now feast your eyes on the 10 stickers starter pack we made.
In the meantime, we might continue to think of additional ways to use Midjourney at the workplace. If you have any ideas on what could be done, just reach out to me and then we’ll see how itchy my backside is, ok? Hope you enjoyed the read!
PS. If you have a kid, you can always use Midjourney to make customised stickers of your own. Kids love stickers!
Credits:
- Stewart Huang | For asking to work on swag together
- Alvin Leu | For helping to generate Midjourney images
- Steven Koh | For the quotes
