COMPLETED : @flaneuse Designs a Flawless Travel Sticker for @buttpacker (See Our Design Journey)

Grab yourself a beer / tea or coffee, let's read some mildly entertaining stuff.

I mentioned this before, when it comes to visuals, I get anxiety when something is off. Norma and I often have fiery debates about our edits, mainly photos - that's where our different points of view come into play. But it's all good, as Russians say "Truth is born through argument ", it helps us view our content more objectively. And yes, if you were wondering - I am half Russian / half Ukrainian (Aleks).

We have been planning to design a sticker for some guerrilla marketing for a looong time, as you probably know it, creative (I hope) people often lack in the organisation department. 1 week before Norma's departing we actually got a lot more focused and started working on the first draft.

So, this Monday I whipped out Photoshop and started putting something together. I admit, I'm pretty shit at drawing, the work I can do in Photoshop is normally of deductive nature. I slapped all the bits that I needed on the canvas - our logo, Instagram, steemit, Facebook and of course, youtube.

Norma suggested (future website link) putting a QR code in it, I was rather sceptical. I definitely used the scanner app on my phone before, however it was never a go to app and I literally never scanned anyone's QR business card. If I don't see myself doing something - I question whether other people would do the same. Norma was pretty adamant, and after a few minutes of discussing it, we decided that it wouldn't hurt to have one. Here is our first version:

" I'm pretty shit at drawing, the work I can do in photoshop is normally of deductive character"

Pretty neat, but I felt too much was going on and it wasn't "eye-catchy". Hence we decided to stay with our most active social media networks + get rid of the QR code, because apparently after a 14 day trial the code would expire, making you pay a monthly subscription.

It felt a bit more focused on the subject now, however still, the visual perfectionist was having a massive anxiety attack inside of me.

Alright, I admit ! Clearly, I wasn't born a graphic designer, but I am not giving up on my baby, @buttpacker SHALL BE SEEN VIA STICKERS all over the world ! At least that's what I promised myself. Time to ask for some more professional help.

We wrote a post on steemit, explaining our situation and asking for assistance, offering a laughable (4 and then 6 because the post accumulated more than we expected) amount of SBD in return, because we are pretty broke at the moment.

Straight away several people responded, some resteemed our post, others upvoted - THE POWER OF STEEMIT COMMUNITY !

Big up:

@starkerz
@allasyummyfood
@nanzo-scoop
@techslut
@wehmoen
@colossus39
@livinguktaiwan
@rod.crisafulli and others !

Same day, in the evening, our local (also a Londoner) wild @flaneuse appears with her attempt to conquer the beast of a sticker. We had a brief convo and agreed to talk in the morning again.

Little did I know that the morning after will be bringing some pretty fucking awesome news. Check this out, the first drafts of @flaneuse 's design were in, and in tangible form, on paper. Super convenient as you can visualise tangible design better, here we go:

@flaneuse is almost intimately familiar with @buttpacker, she knows us / our brand pretty well, we go out / dine together often, discuss @buttpacker related stuff and so on. I feel like she managed to encapsulate the idea pretty well according to our simple brief:

1. Eye-catchy
2. Social media logos
3. Travel related

Pretty decent huh ? I feel @flaneuse did a fantastic job, turning a plain "business card" sticker into something that represents our brand visually.

That wasn't all though, a friend from Baku, Azerbaijan contacted me and told me about their newly-launched Anker Creative Solutions, a company that specialises in digital design and marketing. They were quite busy dealing with with several projects, however we managed to squeeze our sticker into their busy schedule. We just needed some finishing touches based on @flaneuse 's creations.

A refreshingly vibrant take on our sticker, bursting with colour. When you are designing something - it is always great to have several different styles to consider, and we absolutely loved what Anker Creative Solutions have done. The only issue was that we were already so in love with our drafts, we had to ask them to give us a re-touched version of @flaneuse 's sticker, and they delivered.

Now, before I reveal the final version, I wanted to quickly show you our design version, from conception to final product, behold:

I often ask myself, what value does @buttpacker bring to steemit community ? With this post, I guess I was trying to show everyone how the design process worked for us in this case. It can be a daunting task if you don't know what you are doing, so by showing you the process from inception to the final product, we expose some of the icebergs of the creative world and how to avoid them.

Our Design Journey:

1. FIRST AND FOREMOST Plan your delivery time and budget

• As mentioned previously, we kinda suck at time management and organisation. Make sure you plan how much you are planning to spend, how much time is required to design / send finalised design to a printing company. that in turn will also take some time to deliver the finished product to your doorstep.
• Keep in mind the print company might take time to deliver, allow several days.

2. Have an idea in mind / what are you trying to achieve ?

• With our sticker we wanted people to get curious about our branding -> google / search for @buttpacker on social media, ideally attract our target audience to check us out. Let's be honest, if someone is curious to find out more about our strappy butt, chances are they're our target audience.😉

3. Visualise, what's important ?

• Our top priority was to present our branding - make our logo as visible as possible.
• Secondly, to symbolise our presence on social media, the sticker was "sprinkled" with logos of various social media resources.
• Finally, to give our sticker more context - #Travel was added + the Earth globe was included, along with some clouds to symbolise being in the sky, flying / traveling.

4. Size matters (and shape...and aspect)

• Make sure you know what you are going for - circle, square, rectangular, custom shape etc.
• Find a print company of your choice (we ordered 576 64 mm stickers for £28 from banana-print.co.uk - best price we found!) and check their size / shape guide.

5. Can't do it yourself - find the right people

• I wasn't happy with my attempt hence we broadened our search. We advertised on steemit and Instagram, several people responded. We picked the most promising ones and went with them.
• It is worth mentioning that in our case we were able to facilitate a synergistic project, where two separate designers re-touched / improved each other's design.

Alright, you probably managed to down a few beers / cups of tea / coffee while reading this, THE SUSPENSE IS NO MORE. Here is the final product:

Next up, a website... Cumming soon💦💦💦

→ Explore with us on Instagram or Facebook
→ Watch our first episode of "Moroccan Tales" now on Dtube
→We tried a fellow steemian's recipe - Brazilian moqueca be makin' panties fly across rooms in MOUTHGASM #8!