Sticker Characters: Doing What Others Can't

Stickers have become all the rage on instant messaging apps like LINE. The popularity doesn't stop there when social networks are adopting in in their features as well. What makes these oversized emoticons any different from the old emojis people are used to?

Emoji came from a Japanese word. The word is the ideograms or smileys originally available for the Japanese to use in electronic messages and the internet. Emojis have evolved from emoticons that are made from punctuation marks, numbers and letters. And when it the Japanese-styled emojis are exposed both the Western culture, the modern type of emojis that have upright viewing format are created. Users don't need to "tilt their heads" anymore.

When the usage went out of Japan, its popularity increases fast. And since then, emoji that was first created in the late 1990s by Shigetaka Kurita, has evolved.

The worldwide phenomenon of emojis has evolved since the age of mobile devices. Stickers, or large-scale emoticons, still originating in Asia, have been used to express more than just feelings. It's now representing characters.

A sticker is a detailed illustration of a character that represents an emotion or action that is usually a mix of cartoons and emojis. Because stickers can express more than just feelings, they can have more "faces". When emoticons lack body languages, stickers can portray both reactions and body language.

Stickers originated in Japan in 2011 when a LINE came to the country. Due to the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011, many of the country's telecommunication networks were down and the company's data-based calls and text messages worked better than regular calls and text messages. The next year, characters became popular.

Spreading like wildfire, stickers are now adopted in many messaging apps and social media networks. Despite the concept isn't new, the good design behind it is what made stickers popular.

Social media networks have embraced the branding opportunities opened by introducing character sets, and have produced images that can be used as shorthand to express emotion, or just as fun graphics to liven up an otherwise dull conversation.

Behind the Creation of Characters

Stickers are usually bundled with a specific character, each presenting one "emotion". Graphic designers take collaborative and research-oriented approach before designing these stickers. Designers brainstorm emotions to draw sketches that are best for each purpose.

During an initial design phase, designers should know the emotion behind an "act". To do so, they played around with different depictions of the emotion and see what design sticks best to the said character.

As it originated in Asia, original stickers are pretty much influenced by anime and manga-type expressions. Like for example, the eyes are wider apart and larger than general. As designer gets a hold of it, a base piece of character can further develop many other types of characters. And since designers can overdo some of their design, they succeed in creating characters.

Characters may come different from place to place, or from country to country. Designers are heavily influenced by tongue-in-cheeks and users' feedback, as well as culture and current trends.

After completing the design, the character that is set with its bunch of emotions are set to be released. The character is then given its name.

From Character to Culture

The popularity of stickers have populated most, if not all, messaging apps and social media networks.

KakaoTalk is the leading messaging app in South Korea, where it's installed on most of the smartphones in the country. Like its rival in Asia, LINE, the service is what heated up the culture.

Given their thoughtful design and the popularity of chat apps, it shouldn't come as a surprise that some sticker characters have grown popular enough to have their own brand, TV shows and even products.

This has made stickers a new opportunity for designers to merchandise and license their products to others. Whether or not stickers can be the force behind a platform's financial success, they are still contributing much to users' conversation, making it more colorful and fun.

LINE generates about 30 percent profit from stickers. It's not that companies can aim to make profits by selling characters as mascots despite almost 40 percent of mobile device users are polled to be active in using stickers. Stickers, like emoticons, aren't for everyone.

But stickers can certainly entertain by serving a content that may worth much to someone if it brings a few smiles. For some people, sending messages in the form of traditional text is just enough. But with the massive diversity in stickers with characters to liven in up out there in the wild, there's still room to appreciate them as a work of art.