We’ve always been big fans of MU’s unique products. Their press-on stickers are especially satisfying, transferring directly onto a page without adding any thickness to your journal or planner!
One day, while using them, we had an idea: what if we were to collaborate with an artist to bring a watercolor vision of our store’s mascots to life?
Our First Custom MU Sticker Sheet Design
Creating this sticker sheet was a long process, but we definitely think it was worth it in the end! We are absolutely obsessed with the amazing art created by We Are Frogs and it’s been so amazing to see our adorable characters team up with hers.
We developed four unique sticker sheets, each featuring their own theme. These were created with your planner in mind so they have a great variety of sticker shapes and sizes. Each of them contains images that invoke some of our favorite things–boba, coffee, stationery, and reading!
-
Ivy Coffee Shop☕: A coffee shop can be so relaxing–and it’s hard to deny that a latte pairs great with journaling!
-
Sakura Boba Café🌸: Nothing screams springtime like blooming sakura flowers so this design features plenty of cute motifs of dango, boba, and cherry blossoms.
-
Mossy Stationery Store🌿: This set features a lot of mossy and bright motifs. It reminds me of the first day of school, with a brand new planner and tons of art & school supplies!
-
Vintage Library📚: There’s always been something so whimsical about a library! We wanted to channel a mysterious and magical library, with dark academia themes that get you excited about reading.
About The Artist: We Are Frogs
Lee is the talented illustrator behind We Are Frogs and Root People. They are currently working on a graphic novel series about her adorable original characters Boof, Purge, and Wirt–three alien frogs who crash landed on Earth and are learning how to live amongst humanity.
They have a talent for creating adorable sticker sheets, prints, and other stationery supplies. We are absolutely in love with their unique watercolor color style because it mixes perfectly with their kawaii lineart. You can find a lot more than silly frog illustrations on their social media channels because they also film a lot of their process. We Are Frogs creates guides, vlogs, and even provides advice for other small business owners and artists.
Behind the Scenes: How to Create a Custom Sticker Sheet
For any creatives out there interested in taking a peek behind the scenes, we’ve put together a quick guide on what the process was like for us. Keep in mind that this isn’t a comprehensive list of everything that had to be done but more-so an outline of the biggest steps in the process.
-
Ideation: In this stage, we created a concept with mood boards and chose the themes, colors, and aesthetic we wanted to explore for each sticker sheet. This included some back-and-forth about which characters would be included as well as the general look and feel desired for the illustration.
-
Design Creation: Once we had the idea we sent our concept to Lee. While she worked on illustrating the sticker sheet, we worked with MU to create packaging for the design. This step includes multiple revisions of the design to ensure the color and size of print are the best it can be!
-
Production: As soon as your design is finished, you can move to printing. Before printing the larger batch you generally create a sample to get an idea of how your vision looks in real life. If there are any issues (which there often are), you have to move back to step 2. When everything looks good and the draft has been finalized, the MU team printed our design using their high-quality materials.
-
Quality Control & Packaging: When the prints arrive at our shop in California, we check them for any misprints or errors that may have occurred. Each sticker sheet is photographed and uploaded to our website once it has been thoroughly examined. Finally, the finished sticker sheets are packaged for sale.
A Message From Saiko & Finn
Ever since I was a child, it has always been a dream of mine to create fun stationery using my original characters. These sticker sheets feature Mr. Sloth and Westie the Weevil. My personal favorites are the Ivy Coffeehouse and Sakura Boba Café designs. The ivy coffee shop sticker sheet is actually a call back to our first Saiko-exclusive washi tape, the "Ivy Café Series". This process has taught me so much and I am eternally grateful for everyone involved–it was a pleasure to work with such a talented global team! - Saiko 🦥
We had so much fun creating these stickers. It was such a labor of love and I couldn't love the end result more. The MU print-on sticker technology paired with the watercolor artwork by We Are Frogs is a perfect match! When applied it looks like each sticker has been hand painted onto the page. - Finn 🙂
Final Notes
We hope that this blog post was at least a little bit educational! It was so much fun to create this custom sticker sheet and we are absolutely looking forward to more projects like this in the future. If you are an artist that is interested in working with us to create something awesome we would love to hear from you. Please let us know you’re interested by filling out this form.
If you’re interested in picking up this unique collaboration, you can find it here. We have a large selection of other Japanese stationery supplies as well like pencil cases, glue strips and glass dip pens. Take a look at what we currently have in stock!
