How to Make Stickers

Guide LInk

Blah blah blah, I hear you thinking, " how do I make my own?" I hear you ask. Well say less, I've been asked so many times I made my own guide, which is here for your leisure. Click the button for a Google Doc link or just read it below, up to you!

Step 0: Supplies

You’ll need sticker paper! Buy some sheets off of Amazon. I recommend getting ones that are waterproof for longevity purposes, and it's up to you if you want matte, gloss, or transparent, but each comes with different optimal print settings, so keep that in mind. If you have a Cricut machine, you're gonna need the Cricut software (Cricut Design Space) installed and ready. Otherwise have a nice pair of craft scissors, an x-acto knife, and patience handy! 

1. Color Printer
2. Scissors & X-acto Blade / Cricut Machine
3. Sticker Paper

Step 1: Design Principles

I usually design my stickers in Photoshop or Illustrator. If I did it on paper, I do a high quality scan of the illustration and do post processing in Photoshop to clean up noise and add a background. Ideally, you want to take your design and create a solid (usually white) border around it, so that when it's cut out it has some leeway for there to make errors; the Cricut machine is not perfect and if you don’t want to spend a long time calibrating, this room for error is essential. You also want to reduce the amount of curves or edges your border has (without compromising artistic integrity) so it's easier to cut later (a square or circle is much easier to cut than a star).

The easiest way to lay out your stickers for printing is to put whatever designs you want into a Photoshop canvas of appropriate size. Depending on whether you have a Cricut machine readily available to or not this will usually be the size of your sticker paper. If you are using a Cricut machine, the canvas size should be 6.75"x9.25".

Tips: 

1. PNG-8 exports from Photoshop will render in the Cricut Design Space as jagged, resulting in a jittery and more time-intensive cut. Use PNG-24 instead. 
   
2. The Cricut Design Space will not filter out artifacts and will make the cricut machine cut them; make sure your Photoshop or Illustrator document exports only what you want to cut out. This includes patching up holes in your image!
   
3. To fix the layout you'd like when printing and cutting from Cricut, right click all of your laid out stickers and click "Attach."
4. Your layout should have the stickers butting up against the upper left and bottom right corners so that the imported image is that full canvas size accepted by Cricut Design Space. 
   

Step 2: Printing

Then you'll need to print your design. You then need to make sure that your printer is using the correct color transfer. Because printers and computers use different primary colors (CMYK & RGB, respectively) your print could come out super wonky in color if you don't let your computer manage colors to the printer on a CMYK setting. Some printers may have drivers and plugins you may want to install for optimal color management. In Adobe products, putting your canvas setting to CMYK will allow you to view colors in and out of gamut or within the printer's ability to replicate with its inks.

Make sure that your printer is clean. Inkjet printers especially suffer from clogging over time, so you may need to run a cleaning routine, which can be accessed via print controls on your computer. If you're unsure if the printer is clean, print a nozzle check pattern- all inkjets should have this feature in its firmware. 

• If you have a Canon 100 Pro printer I would use the proprietary Canon printer Photoshop plugin, which can be found on the Canon website. You should put your prints on high quality or the photo setting if you can, and select the correct paper type - you'll probably have access to printer settings for matte, glossy, normal paper, etc. You can use either inkjet or color laser!
  
• You may find that the Canon 100 Pro plugin is outdated; you will have to manually install the plugin into the plugins folder of Photoshop by dragging and dropping, which can be found in your system program files. 

Step 3: Cutting

If you're not using a Cricut machine, use a pair of nice craft scissors and patience. After 50 stickers or so your hand will be sore so take breaks (or use your other hand if you're able). If you are using a Cricut machine, you'll need to load your Photoshop layout into the Cricut software. 

1. First, you should turn off any background layer on your Photoshop layout so that the back is transparent. 
2. Then, export your layout as a high quality PNG file and save it somewhere you can find it. 
3. To load it into the Cricut software, you'll want to go into the upload section, and ‘choose file.’ Navigate to your file directory and load it in. 
4. You then want to select the print then cut option and load it in with high definition. 
5. After loading the file in, you'll need to load it into a new project. Do this by selecting your new upload and importing it into a new project. 
6. When you import, it's probably not the right size, so you'll need to resize the image to be the correct dimensions. You can do this by adjusting the height or length to be the same as your desired dimension on the top bar (this is the point of making your Photoshop canvas a particular size). Otherwise, you'll have to measure it in Photoshop / Illustrator. 
7. Hit the make button in the top right. Then, select print then cut option. The software will then prompt you to print out your layout, so do so. 
8. To preserve true color go and use the system dialog, or print the layout to a PDF from the Cricut software and print using the Photoshop plugin I talked about earlier or whatever printer software is appropriate. 

Then, you'll want to select a material. I recommend the sticky note material, although it is possible to create your own custom material that works better with the sticker paper you've bought. There's no real surefire way to determine if the material setting is appropriate without actually cutting and iterating. Then, you'll want to load up your sheet aligned with any one of the corners of the cutting mat as best you can, load in the mat, and hit ‘cut’ on the Cricut machine. Then watch your machine go! If your machine is cutting way off center, you can print out a calibration sheet if you go to the calibration tab on the Cricut software (left hand side bar in the software). Print this calibration cut out preferably on a laser printer, align it, and cut it as you would any other sheet. The system will prompt you to do what it needs to effectively calibrate. 

Troubleshooting

Misalignment:
If you’re off-put by a misalignment on your design’s cutout, try the following:  

1. Add bleed to your layout so that it makes an additional color border to your sticker designs
   
2. Add an empty ‘white’ area around your design to allow for leeway in sticker cutout precision 
3. Recalibrate your machine using the calibration sheet 
4. Adhere your printed sheet as parallel as possible to the edges of any corner of your machine cutting pad. 

Failing Line Detection: 
Oftentimes, the line-detection will fail, especially on glossy surfaces. If you encounter this, the most effective method to address the Cricut being unable to find the line properly is to put matte Scotch tape over the black border around your print-then-cut layout. Other methods include: 

1. Sharpie-ing over the black border 
2. Cutting out black border lines from matte sheets and taping replacements over the old ones. 
3. Recalibrating your machine