Stickers are amazing graphic design artwork that has endeared the eyes of people of all ages for decades. We see them almost everywhere being used as labels, visual communication tools, and decorations.
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Sticker Definition & Meaning
Stickers are small printed digital artwork or illustrations typically used as labels to brand something or mark its classification.
Stickers are small pieces of cutout paper, vinyl, plastic, or other adhesive material printed with custom images or digital art to be attached to certain objects for branding or labeling.
What Is a Sticker?
Stickers are popular printed illustrations with adhesive material on their back so they can be attached to certain things as decorations, branding, or labels for visual communication. Some of them have simple, professional designs like a company logo and some have funny cartoon designs that little kids adore.
10 Types of Stickers
Business Sticker
Large companies and small businesses spend money to print business stickers that represent their brand. These stickers display their business names and official logo that’ll be attached to their products and other properties. Business stickers can help organizations boost their brand awareness campaigns.
Wedding Sticker
Wedding stickers look beautiful and romantic showing the symbol of love and the life-long bond between the bride and groom. These stickers are decorated with flower drawings, heart drawings, and other vintage drawings that ooze romance. Wedding stickers are often attached to wedding giveaway items as labels.
Laptop Sticker
Laptop manufacturing companies create laptop stickers to classify the model and generation of their products. They’re small stickers and they display the brand of the laptop. There are also DIY laptop stickers with fancy illustrations used as adornments by people to personalize the look and feel of their laptops from the outside.
Aesthetic Sticker
Aesthetic stickers are some of the fanciest types of stickers you’ll see anywhere. They have personalized designs that cater to the art taste of individuals and their unique styles or fashion. Some aesthetic stickers have a vintage look, some have cartoonish visuals, and some have modern, sleek layouts.
Monogram Sticker
Monogram stickers display the initials of the names of people, businesses, and organizations and are often used for branding certain properties. They often have stylish visuals that are worth sharing on social media platforms like Facebook, Tumblr, Whatsapp, and Instagram. And because of their very classy look, their designs would do well as wallpapers.
School Sticker
Kindergarten and elementary students greatly adore attaching school stickers to their bags, lunchboxes, books, and other stuff they regularly bring with them. These stickers have designs that appeal to children like Disney wallpapers or cartoon robot illustrations. Teachers purchase such stickers as a reward for their pupils’ excellent work in the classroom.
Birthday Sticker
Birthday stickers would make for lovely birthday gifts to friends celebrating their birthdays. They’re sprinkled with birthday-related clipart such as balloons, presents, confetti, and party hats. Their designs are easy to draw within a circle frame and they can be added with some happy emojis as well.
Delivery Sticker
Delivery stickers are essential to the operations of delivery service companies since they indicate the location of the items’ drop-off locations. They don’t have any fancy aesthetics; just the barcode, name of the receiver, address of the drop-off site, and symbols indicating how the package must be handled. Delivery stickers are attached to delivery boxes and other types of packaging.
Graduation Sticker
Graduation stickers are made for fresh high school and college graduates as a way of congratulating them for their academic achievements. The graduates can stick their graduation stickers to any of their things such as their phones, books, laptops, and tumblers. Such stickers have clipart of graduation caps, the name of the school, and the logo of the school.
Bakery Sticker
Bakery businesses hire artists and designers to craft their branded bakery stickers. They use their stickers to label their packaging and other properties necessary for their daily baking operations. Bakery stickers often have clipart of pastry products and they beautifully showcase the logo and business name of the bakery they represent.
Sticker Uses, Purpose, Importance
Stickers have been around since the early 1900s and have been used for commercial purposes and personal purposes. Basically, they’re just cutouts of printed digital drawings with adhesive on the back side, but they’ve been very handy in communicating information, establishing brands, and decorating certain things.
Adornments
Stickers are often used as adornments for personal stuff because they simply look cool. A good example is children putting stickers on their closets, toys, gadgets, and other things that they use every day for their hobbies; adults as well put stickers on their things such as the backside of their laptop’s monitor. Using stickers as adornments has no vital importance but solely for fashion, vanity, or expression of art preferences.
Labeling
Labeling certain items or properties can easily be done with self-adhesive stickers because all you have to do is stick them on the surface of the object. Most notably, delivery boxes and product packagings have stickers that contain essential information about the product and its receivers. We can also see sticker labels on bottled water, jar containers, and canned goods.
Branding
Stickers have been used for advertisements, specifically those that display the name and logo of a company. Such stickers are attached to product packaging just like label stickers and they’re essential to boosting brand awareness. Some companies sell stickers showing their brand image as merchandise items which is a great marketing strategy.
Children’s Reward
School teachers have long been using fancy stickers as a reward for students doing excellent work on their activities. Most of the aforementioned fancy stickers are star stickers that symbolize a job well done. Stickers as rewards can boost the morale of kindergarten students and encourage them to happily attend school every day.
Stamps
Stickers can also be used as stamps for friendly letters or love letters which beautifies them further. Adorable stickers as stamps improve the aesthetic value of letters with heartfelt messages and will surely be appreciated by the readers. They can also be used as decorations for scrapbooks and personal journals.
What’s in a Sticker? Parts?
Text with the Right Font Style
Some stickers have text that provides context for what they’re all about and what they’re representing. The text can be a slogan, a company name, or a short message of encouragement. It’s important that the text must have the right font style that matches a sticker’s overall aesthetic.
Clipart or Illustration
The clipart or illustration is the center of attraction of a sticker. It’s what gives it aesthetic value and enables it to be appealing to people of all ages. The clipart/illustration is usually crafted by a graphic artist to ensure the best quality.
The Adhesive on the Back
The adhesive material on the back side of a sticker makes it stick to practically any surface. Without the adhesive, you can’t really call a sticker a sticker since it won’t stick. An adhesive is a glue-like substance applied on the back side of a sticker.
How to Design a Sticker?
1. Choose the best sticker size.
2. Identify the type of sticker designs you need to make.
3. Select the perfect set of Sticker Templates with the right visuals.
4. Add more clipart to the chosen sticker template if necessary.
5. Change the background design or background color if needed.
6. Save, download, and print your custom sticker.
Sticker vs. Emoji
A sticker is a small illustration or digital drawing printed on a paper material with an adhesive on the back so it can be attached to the surface of certain things.
Emoji are digital images that typically depict faces that express emotions such as being happy, sad, and angry; some emojis are basically miniature digital images of random objects such as cars, houses, buildings, telephones, foods, flowers, and plants.
What’s the Difference Between a Sticker, a Label, and a GIF?
A sticker is a printed digital image with adhesive material on the back so it can stick as a label, a stamp, or a decoration to a document, a product packaging, or any personal belonging.
A label is a piece of paper with printed text and images that present important information about a product or any item.
The acronym GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format; it’s an image format where the images move like animation and animated stickers.
Sticker Sizes
Since stickers come in different art styles and aesthetics, that means they also come in different sizes. With that said, it’s important to take note of the standard sticker size options before starting a sticker-making project.
- Small Circle Stickers (2 x 2 inches)
- Rectangular Stickers (3.5 x 2 inches)
- Oval Stickers (2 x 3 inches)
- Square Stickers (3 x 3 inches)
- Big Circle Stickers (5 x 5 inches)
- Bumper Stickers (11.5 x 3 inches)
Sticker Ideas and Examples
Creating a unique set of stickers is by no means a tall order. Anyone with access to a user-friendly graphic design or photo editing program can design stickers from scratch. And to make the task easier, sticker ideas are free to view for inspiring sticker design references.
- Sports Sticker Ideas and Examples
- Retro Sticker Ideas and Examples
- Car Sticker Ideas and Examples
- Baptism Sticker Ideas and Examples
- Label Sticker Ideas and Examples
- Packaging Sticker Ideas and Examples
- Safety Sticker Ideas and Examples
- Charity Sticker Ideas and Examples
- Logo Sticker Ideas and Examples
- Floral Sticker Ideas and Examples
Sticker FAQs
What makes a good sticker?
A good sticker is made of durable paper material with a long-lasting adhesive; it also displays a clear image of the illustration and texts it’s presenting.
What are the basic elements of a sticker design?
The basic elements of a sticker design are the right set of colors, digital drawings with quality resolutions, text with fitting font styles, durable paper material, and a long-lasting adhesive material on the backside.
What kind of stickers sell best?
The kind of stickers that sell very well are those that depict objects in a cute way; stickers of fictional characters for kids are also very profitable like Disney characters and Marvel/DC superheroes.
Are stickers waterproof?
Stickers aren’t exactly waterproof; instead, they’re water-resistant which means water can’t easily degrade them, but they can get severely damaged over time through continuous exposure since they aren’t completely impervious to water.
What type of stickers lasts the longest?
Stickers that are made of vinyl and high-quality adhesive can last for up to five years, making them the most durable type of stickers on the market.
What program is best for designing stickers?
The best program for designing beautiful stickers are Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
What are good quality stickers made of?
The best high-quality stickers are made of vinyl and strong adhesives.
Why do people buy stickers?
People buy stickers to put decorations on their stuff such as laptops, closets, bedroom doors, bedroom walls, tumblers, books, notebooks, journals, scrapbooks, and more; they buy stickers with specific designs and art styles that speak to them.
Should stickers be glossy or matte?
Glossy stickers emphasize the color of their designs while matte stickers are more readable; that said, there’s no rule about whether stickers should be glossy or matte as long as they can glorify the design.
What material do stickers not stick to?
Stickers particularly don’t stick well on fabric and cloth if you stick them with adhesives; if you want to put stickers on fabric or cloth, you have to do so using the heat transfer process which can be done with an iron.
What are stickers important in packaging?
Stickers are important in packaging since they display critical information about a cargo such as its description, delivery location, name of its receiver, and other info that prove its legitimacy.
Can old stickers be reused?
Yes, old stickers can be reused simply by applying a fresh adhesive to their back so they can stick to any surface again.
Do outdoor stickers fade?
Outdoor stickers also fade like ordinary stickers but they last significantly longer—up to 3 to 5 years without obvious signs of degradation or ink fading.