Here’s a little peek behind the scenes of how I created the design submissions for Burning Man 2024 stickers.
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 24 sticker designs this year—seven main ideas (below), plus variations. Visit Design submissions for Burning Man 2024 stickers to see all of them.
The event theme this year is “Curiouser and Curiouser,” a quote from Lewis Carroll’s fantastical “Alice in Wonderland” book. I’m shooting for first place, for my design to be the 3-inch round “gate sticker,” given out to all 70,000 attendees as they enter. Last year, three of my designs were chosen to print out of about 400 submissions, but not as the gate sticker.
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. 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!
Here are the typefaces I used:
