I wrote this post a while ago, after I created the 2023 Burning Man sticker designs but before I knew that three designs had been selected for printing. So here’s a little peek behind the scenes.

The greeters at the gate of Black Rock City, the temporary city built by Burning Man workers and participants each year, hand out welcome materials to everyone entering. Among these are always stickers emblematic of the event in general or that year’s theme. I submitted no fewer than thirteen (13) sticker designs this year. Visit my blog post Frequent Font Friday to see some of the designs.

I work almost exclusively in Adobe products for design (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, learning After Effects), so I use the proprietary Adobe Fonts collection often. It’s very convenient: activate a typeface here and it’s available in all your Adobe apps. The “Tags” and “Classification” search features (below) make it relatively easy to find a typeface that fits your usage; you can also search by name or typeface foundry.

For the sticker designs, I used typefaces tagged Rough, Funky, Fun and Futuristic for headers and large type. All these typefaces are fairly distinctive or decorative, which I don’t get to use often in corporate work. So I’m always happy to have a less formal project! I used Atkinson Hyperlegible (see later in this post) for small type and blocks of type, specifically because of its readability.

NOTE: Some of the stickers reference the 9 Phyla of the Animal Kingdom and/or the 10 Principles, the unofficial code of conduct and mantras of Burning Man, meant to make your experience—and the experience of those around you—as connected and joyful as possible. See https://burningman.org/about/10-principles/ for more information.

Here are the typefaces I used:

Click on images to enlarge.

UPDATE: This design was selected by Burning Man for printing as a sticker. I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with AI generated art, which I’ve come to recognize as plagiarism, so I offered to revise this with legally sourced images.

UPDATE: This is the revision of the above design to replace the AI generated images. The new source photos are legally acquired; the weirdness is all me! This final artwork was selected for year-round distribution at the Burning Man HQ in San Francisco.

UPDATE: This is one of the designs selected by Burning Man for printing as a sticker.

UPDATE: This design was also chosen to be printed. I decided to pull it, though, as I felt it glamorized AI art, which I now recognize as plagiarism. I’m really sad about this—I love my Foxbird!

I used the free typeface Atkinson Hyperlegible, from the Braille Institute, for larger amounts of type or small type. The typeface was specifically developed for legibility and readability contrast, particularly in small sizes, as a way to aid readers with low vision. (Thanks to my talented fellow designer Mimi Heft for the tip!) From the Braille Institute website:

Atkinson Hyperlegible – unique design features

For low vision readers
certain letters and numbers can be hard to distinguish from one another.

Solution
Atkinson Hyperlegible differentiates common misinterpreted letters and numbers using various design techniques:

Recognizable Footprints
character boundaries clearly defined, ensuring understanding across the visual-ability spectrum

Differentiated letterforms
similar letter pairs are differentiated from each other to dramatically increase legibility

Unambiguous Characters
designed to increase legibility and distinction

Exaggerated forms
shaping of letters is exaggerated to provide better clarity

Opened Counterspace
open areas of certain letters are expanded to provide greater distinction

Angled spurs and differentiated tails
increase recognition and define distinctive style

Circular details
Links to the history of Braille Institute and braille dots

Atkinson Hyperlegible – available for free to everyone

• Four fonts, including two weights (regular, bold, italics, italics bold)
• 1,340 total glyphs across all fonts, 335 per font
• Accent characters supporting 27 languages
• For designers and anyone interested in making written materials easier to read across the entire visual-ability spectrum
• Improve legibility and readability for low vision readers

In the taxonomy of species, there are 9 Phyla in Kingdom Animalia:

• Porifera (sea sponges)
• Cnidaria (jellyfish, coral and others)
• Platyhelminthes (flatworms)
• Nematoda (roundworms)
• Annelida (segmented worms)
• Arthropoda (insects, spiders and others)
• Mollusca (mollusks)
• Echinodermata (sea urchins, starfish and others)
• Chordata, made up of Vertebrata (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals); Tunicata or Urochordata (sea squirts, salps); and Cephalochordata (which includes lancelets)

The 10 Principles, the unofficial code of conduct and mantras of Burning Man, meant to make your experience—and the experience of those around you—as connected and joyful as possible. See https://burningman.org/about/10-principles/ for more information.

• Radical inclusion
• Gifting
• Decommodification
• Radical self-reliance
• Radical self-expression
• Communal effort
• Civic responsibility
• Leaving no trace
• Participation
• Immediacy