Everything You Love About Stickers, Explained

Ever wanted to know why stickers are so awesome? Of course you did.

Stickers: they’re great. Who didn’t love these adhesive-backed bits of paper growing up?

Image courtesy author / Via Instagram: @tartmandel

Designer Lisa Frank made an entire career out of designing them, adorning sticker sheets with her twirling dolphins, purple kittens, and dancing bears in tophats and sunglasses. I'll be the first to admit that as a kid, I was sticking those things everywhere, and, as the above photo demonstrates, have continued to do so until as recently as last Friday.

But what is it about them that makes children (and many adults) go so sticker-crazy?

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A single sticker in and of itself is not necessarily dazzling; rather, it is the collection and assemblage of stickers that provokes interest. The impulse to collect and arrange things far predates stickers and has been around for as long as human cultures have themselves been around.

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In Victorian Era England, collecting trade cards and pasting them into albums was a common pastime; placing various images into ordered arrangements gave children the sense that they were imposing order in a world that was otherwise overwhelmingly diverse.

It was a time where new developments in printing and marketing meant a huge influx of printed matter and ephemera, so collecting and organizing it could almost be seen as a coping strategy for dealing with all the stuff. It was a way of making sense of the world around you, learning and categorizing as you go along. This was especially helpful if you were learning about new things each and every day, as children tend to do.

No wonder children, both then and now, have a tendency to form collections of all sorts, from stickers to baseball cards to stuffed animals to bottlecaps and so on. They're trying to make sense of it all!

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But of course, Sigmund Freud and his cronies came in and eroticized this whole conception of collecting, reducing the activity to a surrogate for sexual desire. Conceiving of collecting as a masturbatory pursuit of solitary pleasures, they described gathering and displaying objects as an anal-erotic compulsion and an ultimately fruitless endeavor.

This all hinges on the idea that such activities are not productive, when really they are, in a number of ways.

My Sticker Collection / Via stickercollection.blogspot.com

Imposing order on a chaotic world, and reconciling the worlds of childhood with the world of adulthood, as Victorian Era children did, is still a viable explanation for modern day "sticker-ing."

Case in point: these Lisa Frank-bedecked lighters, which took various corners of the Internet (namely, Tumblr) by storm a while back.

Tumblr / Via tumblr.com

Lighters are a particularly teenage artifact – an adult object that represents danger and death, softened and made approachable by stickers featuring gumball machines, rainbow unicorns, and furry baby tigers. Perfect for someone still wavering between the role of child and that of adult (as Britney Spears would say - not a girl, not yet a woman).

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Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room, an installation which involved the artist giving children unfettered access to thousands of multicolored stickers and a completely white room, seems to embody Freud’s concept of uncontrolled drives at first glance.

But we can also view it as a collaboration between the artist and the children, the children proposing their own vision for a world designed by and for adults.

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Proposing a vision seems to be one of the main reasons behind a lot of sticker activity, as well as personalization and customization.

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Most recently laptops have become subject to the sticker impulse, transforming into individualized works of art.

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These sticker jobs allow people to distinguish themselves in a world of uniform technology, to stand out in an otherwise drab sea of grey and black cases. But does the fact that many of them use branded stickers to do so potentially undermine their individualistic intent? Or does it just reflect individuals using the signs and symbols of their culture to build new meanings and messages? In a world where everything is branded, brands become our visual vocabulary, the lingua franca of communication – using them to communicate ideas of individuality and uniqueness doesn't necessarily run counter to that particular ideology.

By and large, sticker-ing is not free of ties to branded culture.

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Even in the supposedly free-wheelin’, chill world of snowboarding, stickers have a largely corporate meaning, representing important marketing tools not only for the companies but for young riders looking to get sponsored. These riders are increasingly realizing the importance of ‘sticker jobs’ for communicating brand loyalty and a unique but marketable style. The same increasingly goes for modern skateboarding and surfing culture as well.

Snowboard rep Lance Webb from Burton Snowboards in Ontario, on the Canadian skate and snow blog push.ca, explains the importance of sticker jobs in attracting sponsor attention: "I am also looking for riders who get the business side of the snowboard industry, since I am in the business of selling snowboards. For them to be a valuable member of my team, they need to always be thinking of how they are contributing to that goal. Things like always taking their snowboard up to the podium with them, having brand stickers on their helmet, etcetera."

Label 228: A Street Art Project / Via camdenoir.blogspot.com

But even if activities like snowboarding are largely concerned with landing sponsors and building branding connections, as these sticker jobs demonstrate, there is one realm where sticker aficionados' core aim is to ‘stick it to the man': the subset of street art known as sticker art.

Image courtesy author

Most commonly done in America on the United States Post Office’s ubiquitous Label 228, this practice originated because the stickers were free, easily available in bulk, and easy to surreptitiously slap up in public places - subways, light poles, mailboxes, etc. These labels, while falling under the category of graffiti which is generally illegal outside of sanctioned spaces, demonstrate a stunning array of creativity on the part of its practitioners.

So stickers really find their expression in a lot of different mediums, for lots of different purposes, by lots of different users.

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They can be a way to arrange and organize the world, to earn credit and reputation within it, or to express one’s individuality! And who doesn’t love every one of those things?