I want share where my sticker ideas come from. The honest answer is: everywhere. A mood I'm chasing, something I stumble across, a performance that stops me mid-scroll and makes me feel something I want to hold onto.
The Tita Era sticker started with Bad Bunny.
If you watched the Super Bowl performance, you know the moment. There's a song where he references his tita, and something about it just landed. For me, tita carries a very specific kind of energy. It's millennial Filipino auntie who walks into a room and owns it without trying. Unbothered, feminine, a little bit extra in the best possible way. When I heard that song I thought, that's a feeling worth celebrating. That's a sticker.
This is how I made it, from that first thought all the way to a finished cut sticker, using the exact process I use for every design.
Step 1: The idea
Not every sticker idea comes from a Super Bowl halftime show, but this one did and I'm not sorry about it.
My ideas usually come from one of two places. Either I'm chasing a specific mood or theme I want to capture, or something hits me out of nowhere and I just know immediately that it needs to exist as a sticker. The Tita Era was firmly in the second category. I knew the concept the moment it formed in my head: typography celebrating that tita energy, surrounded by flowers to lean into the femininity of it.
I also do light trend research when I'm planning new designs. I look at what's resonating on Etsy and Pinterest, not to copy what's already there but to understand what people are connecting with. Florals and celebration stickers are consistently strong, so I knew this concept had legs beyond just my own excitement about it.
When an idea feels both personally meaningful and trend-aware, that's usually the green light to start sketching.
Step 2: The sketchbook
Before I open Procreate, I go to my sketchbook.
For the Tita Era sticker, this step was actually pretty quick because the concept was clear in my head from the start. I sketched out the rough layout: where the typography would sit, how much space the flowers would take up around it, what kind of overall shape the sticker would be. It wasn't detailed or pretty. It was just enough to get the idea out of my head and onto paper so I could look at it.
This is the part of my process I'd encourage every beginner to keep. It's tempting to go straight to your iPad when you have an idea because digital tools feel more productive. But there's something about a quick hand sketch that lets you make fast decisions without getting precious about them. You can cross things out, try a different layout in the margin, and move on in two minutes. That kind of loose thinking is harder to do when you're already in a design app.
My sketchbook doesn't look impressive. But it's where everything starts.
Step 3: Building it in Procreate
This is where the Tita Era sticker actually became itself.
I brought my rough sketch concept into Procreate and started with the typography. Lettering is something I genuinely love and also something I'm still developing, so this part of the process is always a mix of flow and frustration depending on the day. For this sticker, it came together fairly smoothly because I had a clear feeling I was chasing. I wanted the letters to feel celebratory and feminine without being overly delicate. Bold enough to read well at sticker size, but with enough personality to feel hand-drawn.
Once the type felt right, I built the flowers around it. I draw my florals freehand in Procreate using the Apple Pencil, which lets me keep that hand-drawn quality even in a fully digital illustration. I'm not going for botanical accuracy. I'm going for feeling. Loose petals, simple leaves, the kind of flowers that feel like they belong on something joyful.
The color choices came last. I wanted to honor that tita energy, which to me reads as warm, rich, and unapologetically feminine. I kept the palette focused rather than throwing every color at it. A tight color story makes a sticker feel intentional rather than busy.
Step 4: Preparing the file and printing
Once the design was finished in Procreate, I exported it and prepared it for print.
This is the less romantic part of the process but it matters just as much. I make sure my file is at the right resolution for printing, I do a test print first to check my colors, and I adjust if anything looks off from what I see on screen. My printer and my screen don't always agree, so I've learned to save the hex codes of colors that print accurately and build my palettes around those.
For a typography sticker with florals, getting the colors right on print is especially important because the details are small and any muddiness in the ink shows up quickly.
Step 5: Cutting with the Silhouette Portrait 4
This is still my favorite part.
I bring the file into Silhouette Studio, set up the cut lines, and let the machine do what it does. Watching the blade trace cleanly around the letters and flowers of a design I made from a random moment of inspiration is genuinely one of the most satisfying feelings in this whole process.
The Tita Era sticker came out exactly how I pictured it. Typography, florals, that celebratory feminine energy all the way through. It went straight into my shop.
The whole process, start to finish
Inspiration, sketchbook, Procreate, print, cut. That's it. It doesn't always go smoothly and it doesn't always go fast, but that's the shape of it.
What I want you to take from this is that your process doesn't have to be complicated or perfectly optimized to produce something real. Mine started with a Super Bowl performance, a feeling about what it means to be in your tita era, and a sketchbook that nobody else will ever see. The sticker it produced is now sitting in my shop, ready for someone who gets it.
That's enough.
If you're working on your own first sticker designs and want to talk through the process, leave a comment below. I'd love to hear what's inspiring your ideas right now.
