How to Make Packaging Stickers for your Small Business in Procreate and Cricut Design Space

1. Introduction: Hi there. My name is Kathy and I am the owner of bits of joy. I started my small business in 2011, making him a polymer clay products such as magnets, key chain, earrings, and ornaments. Since then, I've digitized some of my designs to create key chains, stickers, sticker sheets, journals, and even some stationary like notepad. In today's class, I'm going to show you how you can make your own branding and packaging stickers for your business. As a small business owner, I used to purchase stickers for three to $5 a sheet for only 20 or 30 stickers and I would have to pay for shipping, wait for them to arrive. And it was just costing a lot of money. I thought to myself, if I can make my own sticker sheets, I should be able to make my own packaging stickers. So that's when I began doing that. Making your own stickers for your packaging is really economical. Make your packages more fun and exciting for your customers by customizing them to holidays, special occasions, or even certain customer types. In addition to using these as packaging stickers, you could also design your own stickers to use a vendor fairs or markets by creating your own color coded system or price tags, want to grow your business. You can also use this class to build your own sticker business. I'll show you how you can sell your designs digitally or adapter designs to sell your own packaging sheets if you desire. This class will require an Apple iPad and Apple pencil, as well as the Procreate app and Cricket Design space. You do not need to be an artist or need to be able to draw well to make your own packaging stickers. You do not need to know fancy hand lettering either. I'll show you how to make simple, effective stickers. Let's begin 2. Class Project: This class will begin by creating a sticker design. So think beyond just thank you for your order or handmade by Kathy for your packaging. So my personal brand is fun, Kawhi, and whimsical. And I really want to bring people joy when they get their order in the mailbox. So think about the emotions that you want to convey through your sticker and tell that story through your lettering. That N3 or colors. Here are a few examples of stickers that fit my brand. You are going to love this, the happiest meal ever, super cute things inside. Open me already. I'm totally handmade. You deserve this, don't worry, she won this Order made my day and hello, I have arrived. I like to use my brand colors for my stickers, but feel free to start with any color, any color palette that you like, because you can always change it or create variations of your sticker very easily. So to start off, think of a short phrase that you want to use for your sticker and the type of style that you'd like to go with it. So join me in the next video to get started. I'll show you how you can create your sticker, outline it, export it out of Procreate, and import it into a cricket design space. And then how to optimize your printing and what to do with your stickers after, are you ready? Let's go 3. Design & Setup: Alright, after you open your Canvas, choose your favorite color and your favorite brush. Experiment with the sizes that you like. You don't want to make it too thin or too thick. So feel free to experiment, doesn't have to be perfect. And create a new layer. Once you're done, we want to work on separate layers so that it's easier to catch mistakes and fix them. Now I'm going to work on the next word brightens. And as you can see, I'm hearing the bottom of the page. And I might not have room to fit the rest of my words on here. So what I'm going to do after I complete this word is combined several of my layers by swiping to the right and then moving it up on the page. Create a new layer. And start on your next word. Alright, so once you are done lettering, take a look at your overall composition and see if you're happy with everything. If not, you can adjust individual layers. Make things bigger, make things smaller, or center things up. After you do this step, you're welcome to add some embellishments, like little hearts or stars. I'm going to try a little accent marks. Actually it doesn't look that good right there, so I'm going to try it on a different spot. There we go. That looks a little more fun. So now I'm going to show you how we are going to modify a brush so that it can become our outline brush for our sticker. Swipe right? On mono line. Head to brush studio properties and increase the size all the way to the maximum on Brush behavior. Now that we're back to our design, we are going to turn off our background color so that we can see our outline better and create a new layer and move that new layer all the way to the bottom, underneath every other layer. If you're happy with your design, you can pinch all your layers together here. What we'll do is select white with our outline brush, and also find the correct size that we like. So choose what feels comfortable for you. I'm going to go with something in-between, slowly start outlining. And this white part that you're putting in is going to be the part that you're cricket machine cuts. So once you make your last stroke and fill up your design, you can color fill by dragging the color onto your layer. Or you can color this in manually. Now, you can pinch all your layers together, as I mentioned earlier, if you're happy with your design. And this is a good thing to do because you can actually check and see if there's any spots that you missed with your outline by turning your sticker layer off 4. Export & Import : Next up, we are going to save our file and give it a name. To upload, click the wrench icon and click on Share and PNG and upload it to your destination of choice. I personally like to access cricket design space from my computer, so I'm uploading it to my drive and then heading to my computer and then downloading my file. After you complete that, open up cricket design space and select a new project and upload your PNG document. I'm going to select complex here for image type and hit Continue, Applying, continue. And then I'm going to select Print, then cut image. That way I can print it off my printer. And since I have categories for my sticker collections, I'm going to sort it to save me some time later. Go ahead and upload your image once you're ready and insert it. And once you're on your Canvas, you can size your file to the size that you like. I usually like to keep my packaging stickers around one to 3 ". I'm going to scale this down and then zoom back in and then move it to where I like it on the page. And then I'm going to select make it. Now, when I plug this in, I don't know how many I can fit on here, so I like to click on Project copies and see how many stickers I can get on one page to maximize printing. That looks like I'll only be able to get about 12 on here, and it doesn't look like that's very efficient. So what I'm going to do is go back and scale down my image to make it just a little bit smaller so that I can fit more than 12 stickers onto a sheet. So let's try something like 20. Wow, look at that. So we can probably add four more. Awesome. So that uses up a lot more paper. When you're ready, click Continue and send it to your printer. 5. Printing & Trimming: Alright, so next we are going to send our paper to the printer. Click on Send to printer. Make sure that you are a cricket is connected. Make sure you have the correct Printer selected. Turn off the bleed and then turn on system dialogue and hit print. A new box will open up with additional settings. So think about what kind of paper you're using today. I'm using matte photo paper, so I'm going to oh, actually, I'm sorry, sticker paper, but I'm going to select photo paper because that is what is closest to what I have. If you're using glossy, makes sure to select that. Then we are going to select washi tape as our custom material. And you will find this under Browse all materials. And I find that the washi tape setting works really well with stickers when you do not want them to be die cut, meaning you don't want them cut all the way through your paper. After printing is complete, grab a light or standard cricket bat and position your sticker on the grid. Smooth at all on there. And get ready to load it in your machine. Once you've unloaded, go ahead and peel away your sticker sheet carefully from your cricket mat. And you can either leave it as is or you can trim it if you plan on selling it. I also like to clean up the edges with this little device that I have that rounds the corners 6. Uses & Ideas: Alright, now let's get to the fun part. You've made these really cute stickers. What do you do with them besides just putting them on a box or a mailer? I'll give you a few ideas. Option number one, you can sell your sticker designs. Simply upload your PNG file as a digital file onto a website and make some passive income. Option number two, use it to label your products with prices or to distinguish between different products. So I have stickers and magnets that look really similar. And I like to make little stickers that say sticker magnet. I also like to add additional info onto products. The other thing that I like to do is to label my different sticker types. I offer standard Matt stickers as well as weatherproof Matt stickers, which really look similar. I also have glossy stickers. So when I make stickers to sell, I package them in individually, cellophane wrappers. Then I put what type of sticker paper I'm using on the back. This helps keep me organized. Lastly, you can use these stickers for your kids, water bottles to label office supplies. Pretty much anything you can put a sticker on. If you think of a fun way to utilize these stickers that I haven't mentioned, please share them in the class discussion or share a picture in the class project section 7. Closing Remarks: Today you learned a new skill to help up level your business as well as save money in your small business, you learned how you can create more than just your average boring thank you sticker. You learn that you can have flair to every aspect of your business and can use a sticker concept idea to go beyond just sticking it on a box. Feel free to use it on your products and vendor fairs, digital designs or more. If you want to dive deeper into sticker making, I encourage you to take my other course, how to make cute sticker sheets and procreate and Cricket Design space for beginners. Please send me photos of the stickers you create, uploading them to the project gallery on Skillshare and be happy to reshare your work on my Instagram, bits of joy crafts. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time. Happy sticker making