Stickers

Printouts that you do not lose because they are adhered to a very large thing

January 31, 2020 — January 5, 2022

diy
making things
Figure 1

1 Printing stickers

Various companies offer fancy variant stickers: vinyl, transparent, holographic, custom shapes…

Classic hack: If I upload my sticker designs to a print-on-demand site like Redbubble, people might even pay me for them.

2 Hex stickers

Figure 2: via rworkshop.uni.lu

A nerdy cult phenomenon. Nerdy hexagonal promo stickers that tessellate, for people who find it needful to promote things tessellated, and also honey bees. The specifications ensure that this remains standardised, and the full standard is excellent, including such clauses as section 2.

When you exchange stickers, you may be given a sticker that does not conform to this specification. If this is the case, thank them for the time spent on designing and printing the sticker.

Emi Tanaka explains and gives a PowerPoint template that is useful for this purpose.

The R package hexSticker automatically generates stickers to the required hex sticker specification from your graphics.

hexbin collects the world’s nerdy hex stickers for the admiration of other nerds. (You can contribute.)

Pre-designed stickers are available on e.g. pilcrow’s redbubble shop. NB, the redbubble sticker spec (external 76mmx88mm) does not match the official hexbin spec (internal 43.9mmx50.8mm), so beware standards incompatibility mixing them.