Starting as s LINE Sticker Creator!
Around 2016, the LINE app really hit the market for millennials in Indonesia. Like everybody chatting, sending files, save photos, notes through the LINE app. But what really caught my eye is the “sticker” in the LINE app.
Sticker replaces our daily conversation
In a group or a person to person. I thought of several reasons to use stickers in our daily conversation are
It’s fun, enjoyable, and interactive
“Are you just too tired to express your feeling by typing? Go use sticker”It’s easier to express your current conditions
“Do you want to send messages as fast as possible? Go use sticker”
As a Designer, I see an opportunity for making passive income by being a creator. But then over and over again, I make a sketch but never uploaded. Only a pile of paper that has never been used, so I started to do my small wins every day
I just making more excuse to not work on it
Making 40 characters with a different expression each of it? Doing research to pick which expression really needed? is it good enough? will people like it? is it gonna be useful? I think it’s way too complicated. Arghhhh :(
The Dream Jar!!
Until it was 2019. When I am a graduate, I have found a single reason to finish it? to finish my dream jar since I was a college. Yesss, the dream jar, if when you still child have a bucket list, then I do implement it
I believe that every single dream that we have we have to push it to finish it, a simple reason if you asking “why?” because I just don’t want when I got old when I can’t do the things that I can do today. I just don’t wanna say
“If only I had done it”.
From a simple magical reason like that. I started drawing what kind of character that I would make for my first sticker.
Scratch Concept
So, I decided to make this character “Mao Nyu!”
This character needs a soft touch since the stickers need some cuteness on it and I meanwhile do love food so it first thought that come into my mind is “mochi”.
Another point of view, that I use to design this character is from the behavior why some users on the LINE app using stickers, which we just too tired to typing some messages and yet our expression need to keep deliver to our chat-mate so to describe it, then I choose a character that Sleepy, like Snorlax (pokemon) really represent to this idea hehe. So voila! Mao Nyu sculptured based on these two ideas.
Designing Expression
After finding the basic ideas of how the character souls, the next one is the important part from is “how might I designing expression on stickers that people would imitate the expression of the users?”
So basically the first thing that I do is doing a design exploration by seeing the top of stickers content on around 2–3 months. After that, I found out that some of the characters mimic real-life communication in a specific way of communication which are
- Simple day-to-day conversation, like agreeing, reject, saying hi, etc
- Something that they afraid of to express, like honesty, love, etc
- Something that fun, like gaging, banter, etc
After got those 3 findings as my main idea to do a sketch, what I did is apply the atomic components on the level of the designing character, is a method that rather than designing one by one character, I tried to make the structure of the stickers into simple components, for instance like the combination of eye, the combination of mouth, etc. This method helps me a lot when mix-and-match for the expression of the characters.
And after that, I can run smoothly design all the characters :)
I was so happy that I can finish drawing and saw it launch an online creator sticker. and that’s the story of how one of my list on my dream jar was fulfilled.
Download the link here and use Mao Nyu! to express your feelings in your daily conversation with your friends or family.
