The metal/fire/sculpture art collective I’m part of, the Flaming Lotus Girls, or FLG, was interested in having merchandise made that, unlike these, wasn’t associated with a particular event or sculpture.
I took on the challenge!
I found a beautiful illustration of a lotus flower at stock house Shutterstock and used it as my base image:
Petals reminiscent of flames; flames reminiscent of petals.
Work for arts organizations is often more freeing for me than work for corporate clients, with more daring choices possible—even desirable—in layout, color and type. The frequent tradeoff, however, is lower budgets and more design constraints. The constraints, here, for an inexpensive sticker: 3″ square or round; red, black and white only. But constraints can be good too, encouraging the designer to whittle down their thinking to get to the essence of what needs to be communicated.
- I started with round stickers, and just the lotus without the surrounding flames. I separated the lotus into the inner and outer flowers by using different colors. My favorite round design is red “A,” which I put first in its group when presenting them. (For the rest, scroll down to the A-B-C-D round and square designs below the rule.)
- For the square stickers I used the lotus plus the flames in the designs, and kept the lotus all in one color. My favorite square design is black “A,” which I also put first.
I relayed the designs to the FLG organizer and she did an informal poll of artists at the production site. The winners: round “A” and square “A,” my favorites! Very nice to have my design judgement validated with real-world results.
The original scope was one 3″ sticker, but the feeling for both designs was so strong that the organizer decided to print square “A” as a sticker, and have round “A” created as a 3.5″ diameter embroidered patch. Embroidered patches generally have a 1/8″ overlock border; we decided to have this in metallic silver (see just below).
A mockup of the embroidered FLG patch with the selected design and metallic silver border.
The selected design for the sticker.