UCLA student launches hand-drawn sticker pack on App Store
Third-year design media arts student Maddy Pease designed her first sticker pack for iOS devices this summer, using Crayola markers and editing in Adobe Photoshop. Design Media Arts (DMA) offers its students a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to media creation that fosters individual exploration and innovative thinking. Within the department, design is a process and a way of thinking, and media arts foreground experimental media creation. The results emerge in and on books, galleries, game consoles, installations, films, magazines, performances, public spaces, televisions, websites, and now smartphone apps and extensions. DMA strives to create socially and culturally relevant objects, experiences, and spaces.
"Maddy Pease spent her summer poolside with a Crayola marker in hand.
While the third-year design media arts student worked at a swim and tennis club, she used markers and paper lying around the facility to design letters, stars and hearts.
Pease’s poolside drawings became the foundations of her first sticker pack for iOS. She turned her sketches into animated designs, which Apple device owners have downloaded from the App Store more than 2,000 times. Pease said creating the free sticker pack – titled “Maddy’s First Sticker Pack” on the App Store – allowed her to experiment with color and software.
Sticker packs are app extensions which consist of small images – or stickers – that can be added to messages sent through iMessage on a device running iOS 10 or later. Pease said she first discovered sticker packs last spring, but was dismayed with the limited selection available on the App Store. One of the sticker packs Pease first downloaded consisted of images of cats doing silly things.
“It’s like ‘Okay, this is cool … but it’s not personal to me and I never would use it as much as I wanted to,’” she said.
Pease said she wanted to make a sticker pack she could use regularly with her friends, so her sticker pack consists of phrases Pease and her friend Kathryn Vaccaro use together in everyday conversation. The stickers feature pet names and inside jokes between the two, such as a sticker with the phrase “baby boo,” written in a bright, pear-green color. The pair uses the phrase as a nickname for each other.
“These things I say literally on the daily, and that was the whole point,” Pease said. “All of these (stickers) have stories behind them.”
Pease and her friends constantly send each other stickers from the pack, and Vaccaro said she uses Pease’s sticker pack regularly, even with people who don’t know Pease personally."— Andrew Warner, Nov. 8, 2017
Read the full article at the Daily Bruin website.