Assignment 3: Vinyl Sticker Designs

What were you trying to accomplish?

I was trying to make designs that I would want to put onto the back of my car. I was inspired by Earth Day coming up and wanted to make the stickers have an environmental theme. I also was inspired the Portlandia TV show "Put a bird on it" sketch.

What technical skills did you use to create the project?

I sketched out my ideas and used Illustrator to make the final designs. I then used the vinyl cutter in the school lab to cut the designs out in the vinyl. I then used my dexterous cutting skills to manually cut my design (see below) and place the elements all together on the sticker. 

How do you feel you did on the project?

I was too ambitious. I could have done a better job anticipating the difficult nature of working with vinyl. I made my designs way too complicated with tiny details that the vinyl cutter could not cut properly. I ended up having to spend several hours with my exacto knife manually cutting out the designs, and it shows in the final product. Some of the tiny details literally fell off when I was cutting them so there are some gaps in the stickers, and areas where the colors don't line up properly. However, I put enough effort into making the final product that the stickers look pretty good considering I cut them out by hand.