Inkling Memento Stickers

Employee swag featuring unique illustrations for each social club at Inkling.

Inkling memento stickers SWAG mockup splash half

Project Brief

Design Challenge: how can each of Inkling’s social clubs be spotlighted and unified through design?

I was approached by Inkling’s people and culture team to create a series of “mementos”. These were going to be something like enamel pins, buttons, or stickers employees could sport on their clothing and accessories. A series was desired to represent the different social clubs we have at the company. The details of the project were nailed down as the designs were being developed and tested in different ways.

Skills & Tools Used:

Final Designs

There were 12 stickers designs in all, printed in various quantities for our employees to use however they wish!

Book Club sticker
Maker Club and Poker Club stickers
Inkling memento stickers
Final design for each sticker

Design Process

The process began by deciding what directions we wanted to see: abstract, mascot, metaphor, literal, etc. We also wondered what kind of colors, rendering, and depth to use in the illustrations.

Sketches

Sketches were helpful in exploring some of these ideas, and how approachable they’d be when doing iterations.

Inkling memento sticker sketches 1
Inkling memento sticker sketches 2
Inkling memento sticker sketches 3
Inkling memento sticker sketches 4

Dropped Concepts

With early sketching we came to an idea where all the stickers could be notched together. We thought of this working a few ways this could work with hexagons fitting into a strict pattern, or creating limbs with cupeling notches at the ends. None of these ideas held up once we realized how the printing requirements would impose a white border around the sticker. Additionally, if employees were to put these stickers on their laptops there was no certainty if they’d have enough room to arrange them all in a definite pattern.

inkling memento stickers iterations grid test
inkling memento stickers iterations test

Iterations

Here’s three examples of how different concepts were tested and narrowed and were then pushed towards a polished image.

inkling memento stickers iterations for INK IT Reading Challenge
A progression of the “INK IT Reading Challenge” sticker design.
inkling memento stickers iterations for Makers Club
A progression of the “Makers Club” sticker design.
inkling memento stickers iterations for Winkling
A progression of the “Winkling” sticker design.

Conclusion

The end result was a set of stickers which represented popular and active social clubs at our company. We used these stickers as a way to increase excitement and interest for our clubs to bring employees together. Many have put stickers on their laptops, water bottles, and notebooks as a way to proudly represent Inkling but with a bonus of relevant personal interest.

This project was made by and for Inkling (2019).

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