Super Diner Donut Stickers

In this week's design challenge from Behance, I created some donut stickers for the Super Diner brand. I learned a little about the new recolor tools in Adobe Illustrator, as well as cool little things with strokes I did not know about before. Let’s check out how I made some tasty treats.

First I created the ring shape for the donut with a couple of circle shapes. Remember to use the hotkey “L” to use the circle tool. Copying the first circle, and pasting with Ctrl/Cmd + F to paste it in the same place as the first circle helps to keep things aligned when shrinking the second circle for the donut hole. I then began to draw frosting shapes on the donut with the brush tool. This tool lets you draw freely without having to worry about points and curves. I finished the donut off with some sprinkles created by using the rectangle tool and rounding the edges.

Now to turn the donut into a sticker! With everything selected, I made a copy of my donut and again pasted it on top of itself. With everything still selected, I used the pathfinder tool to create a single shape out of all the shapes I used to make the donut. This new shape is going to be the sticker bleed area for a machine to cut out the right sticker shape without having to cut off your illustration. To do this, select the shape and go to path options under the object menu. Use the offset path feature to create a perfectly shaped stroke around your illustration. This stroke may still be covering the donut, to fix this you can use the hotkey “shift + ctrl/cmd + [“ to move the layer to the bottom of everything. Now the donut is starting to look like a sticker! 

Another cool thing I learned about strokes is that you can add multiple strokes to the same shape in the appearance menu. Why would you want to do that? You can create some interesting rainbow effects and simulate some interesting depth effects when you layer strokes larger and larger on top of each other.

After the donut was done, I wanted to try to create some color variants quickly. This is where the recolor menu comes into use. First, make a copy of the donut so you can compare your new colors to. With one of the donuts selected, the recolor options can be found in the Edit menu. From there you can use colors from any image to recolor your illustration. The possibilities are endless. I still need to learn a little bit more about some of the features, but it’s fun to play around with to see what you can come up with. I tried to make 6 variations. Not 100% happy with any of them yet, but I think it’s getting close.

There you have it, Super Diner donut stickers ready for printing! I can almost taste them.