Every sticker in the Mojimix keyboard has been through the same four steps. None of them is automated, and the first one is the longest.
1. Somebody argues for it
Before anything is drawn there is a written brief, and each idea in it has to justify itself. Here is the entry for the grumpy alpaca:
…represents an indigenous culture of South America as well as having the cute animal factor.
And the African instruments:
African continent with three iconic African instruments: kora, goblet drum and mbira (thumb piano). The background could be coloured according to the satellite picture of the continent (yellow for desert, green elsewhere), or a subtle batik-style design in the same colours, if it isn’t too busy.
Two things are worth noticing. The first is that the instruments are named — kora, goblet drum, mbira — rather than left as “African instruments” for an illustrator to invent. The second is that somebody was already worrying about whether the background would be too busy, months before a pencil touched paper.
Not every idea survives this stage. Of the fifteen in that brief, five were never drawn.
2. It gets sketched, more than once
The Blue Mosque took a page of thumbnails before anyone committed. Three small studies, pencilled with the words UP, DOWN and CORNER — the question being what angle you look at a building from when it has to read at the size of a thumbnail.
That is the real work of a sticker. A photograph of the Blue Mosque has six minarets and several hundred windows. A sticker has to keep the six minarets, because that is what makes it that mosque and not another one, and lose almost everything else.
3. It is drawn properly, then drawn again flat
The sketch becomes a finished illustration, and then a flat vector version that survives being shrunk. The two do not always look the same. Detail that is beautiful in pencil becomes mud at keyboard size, so the flat version is not a tracing — it is a second set of decisions about what matters.
4. It ships free
Then it goes into the app, in a pack, at no cost. That has been true from the start and is not a launch offer.
What we get wrong
Sometimes the filename lies. We keep a file called mexican-guitarron, and the
artwork shows an ordinary six-string guitar — a guitarrón is a completely
different, much larger instrument. Another file is called african-continent
and the drawing is three instruments. A third was labelled a chimp for years
and is an orangutan.
Those are caught by opening the picture, which sounds obvious and is exactly the step that gets skipped. Every description on the stickers page has now been checked against its own artwork rather than against its filename.
See them
All 43 are on the stickers page, sorted into collections by what they are. Or get the app and send one.