A sticker is dated by what it is made of and how it was cut

① The one-line version

Paper and gloss labels, cut to rectangles, circles and ovals, until the sign shop’s vinyl cutter becomes common; die-cut vinyl round a drawing from about 1990; holographic foil as a cheap slap from the mid-nineties; the name-tag slap from the blank “hello” label; the tag from the late sixties; the political stencil from 1968 — and a patch on a real logo is always matt and always larger than what it hides.

② The material, decade by decade

Years	What a sticker could be
1935–1960	The self-adhesive label is an American invention of 1935, and for twenty years it is a trade product: price labels, parcel labels, the gummed slogan label that you licked. On a wall, a slogan or a notice on paper.
1960–1975	Coated gloss paper, screen-printed or letterpress, punched as rectangles, circles, ovals and the occasional starburst. Bumper stickers on vinyl-coated paper. The blank name-tag label with its coloured band.
1975–1990	Punk and the photocopier: black-and-white, one colour added by hand or by a second pass. Skateboard and surf brands print stickers by the thousand. Still cut to simple shapes by a steel die.
1990–2005	The computerised vinyl cutter, first sold to sign shops in the early eighties, is everywhere; stickers are cut round the drawing with a white border. Free shipping labels from the post office become slaps. Holographic foil arrives.
2005–2026	Online sticker printers: die-cut vinyl in any shape, in small runs; print-and-cut machines at home; matt, gloss, foil, glitter and transparent stock.

The studio keeps paper and gloss labels to the shapes a steel die could punch before 1990, and turns the die-cut shapes on — the character with its white border, the speech bubble — from 1990.

③ The kinds

• The name-tag slap: the blank “hello, my name is” label, with a coloured band top and bottom, has been sold since about the late fifties. Writers took to it because it was cheap, blank and fast: a tag in marker across the white panel, slapped in passing.
• The tag and the throw-up: the signature tag comes out of Philadelphia and New York at the end of the sixties; the bubble-letter throw-up follows in the seventies. On a sticker, the tag is written or printed, often with the crew and the year in the corner.
• The stencil: the political stencils of May 1968 in Paris, then the figures and animals of the early eighties. A sticker version keeps what gives a stencil away: the bridges that hold the islands of the letters in, the overspray, the drips.
• The slogan: a few words, big, on a circle, a burst or a speech bubble. The studio’s slogans are invented in each language and kept away from known ones.
• The character: a cartoon creature with a white border, cut round its outline — a vinyl-era sticker, 1990 on.
• Band, label, zine and crew stickers: in the lettering of the scene — the cut-out ransom letters of punk, the blackletter of metal, the graffiti letters of hip hop, the smiley and the mono of the rave, the lowercase of indie.
• The parody warning: a hazard triangle and a joke in capitals, on yellow.

④ How a slap ages

Sun takes the reds and yellows first and leaves a cyan ghost; rain wrinkles a paper label and grimes the bottom edge; keys and buffing scratch the face; a corner lifts, collects dirt and folds back. A paper sticker tears as it is scraped off and leaves a white patch of paper and glue that the next one goes on top of — which is why slaps gather where other slaps already are, at eye height, overlapping. The studio prints fading, scratches and grime into the sticker, so an aged sheet can go on the set as it is, and draws peeling corners in the mock-up only.

⑤ Masking a real logo

• Larger than the logo: measure the logo across its widest points and add a margin on every side — two to three millimetres for a printed logo, five or more for a raised or embossed one, whose edge casts a shadow through thin vinyl. A round patch over an oblong logo has to clear its corners, so its diameter is the logo’s diagonal plus the margin.
• Matt: gloss vinyl catches the key light and draws the eye to what it hides.
• What goes on it: a plain colour close to the object’s, a skin (brushed metal, carbon, matt black), an invented firm, or a sticker that looks like it belongs there.
• Check the other side: a laptop has a logo on the lid and often one on the bezel and the base; a trainer has one on each side and on the tongue.

⑥ The sheet and the knife

A cutter needs to know where to cut. The studio draws the knife as a rose hairline round every sticker, and the Cut-line PDF writes it as vector paths on a spot colour named CutContour — the name most print-and-cut software looks for — with the artwork separated to CMYK beneath it. Leave three or four millimetres between stickers so the knife does not lift the web between two cuts, and a margin round the sheet for a desktop machine’s registration marks, which its own software adds.

⑦ What is invented

Every tag, crew, band, zine, slogan, character and firm is made up. A real writer’s tag on a wall in shot reads as their work, and a real band’s or brand’s name is a clearance question; the Checks panel knows the famous ones and flags them, and says so plainly when a short invented tag might collide with a real one by chance.

⑧ What we could not verify

• The exact year the blank name-tag label was first sold; the studio uses 1959.
• When die-cut vinyl stickers became common enough to be street slaps, rather than possible; 1990 is a round estimate.
• When holographic foil became cheap enough for a slap; the studio uses 1995.