adventures in cubing

If you’ve followed this blog at all, you’ll know that I’ve spent a fair bit of time looking for vendors that could print custom logo stickers (for branded center stickers). As my logo grew more refined and intricate, so did my expectations from vendors.

The logo started as a monochrome/grayscale simple stylized G that I printed on my laser printer. I eventually had a sheet of that logo printed, as I described in my first sticker post. From there, the logo evolved into a G on a colored background resembling a scrambled cube, the letter setoff by a white stroke. I eventually discovered oliverstickers.com, which is run by Olivér Nagy, a really nice guy from Budapest who prints stickers for a lot of European cubers. He printed me a good amount of stock in that logo at great prices; as I blogged about those stickers, the stock quality was good and full-color printing was sharp enough. There was slight pixelation, but only up-close; from a normal distance, they look great. The pricing was excellent (about $13 to my door), and they arrived within two weeks of ordering, even with shipping from Hungary. Here’s a link to the logo section of his shop. When I developed my new logo sting for my videos, the logo evolved once more — adding a drop shadow, a reflection/glare, and a bit more refinement to the G’s size and placement.

I was about to place another order with Olivér, when Bradley (Izo) of puzzleaddictions.com, knowing I was looking for a domestic sticker printer, made me some test stickers. They’re terrific:

As shown in the video, I received stickers in 4 sizes — 3×3, 4×4, 5×5 and 6×6. I received transparent and white-stock in the 3×3 size, with the other sizes transparent only. The print quality was noticeably better on the white stock, although that’s partially due to them being larger stickers, I’m sure. I’ve only applied logos to my 3x3s in the past, given the sizing issues, rounded corners on my modded 4x4s, etc. I messed around a bit for the pics and videos, and did sort of like a sticker on the corner of a 4×4 (but did not like it on one of the center cubies). I also liked it on the center of a 5×5. I placed a 3×3 sticker on a 2×2 and didn’t really like the way it looked. Here’s a gallery with some of the same photos:

In the close-ups, you can see some pixelation/noise in the stickers. To the naked eye from a reasonable distance, that is not at all noticeable; they look great. The side-by-size photo comparing it to the Nagy stickers is striking. These are markedly sharper, even with a more intricate design. (Mind you, the Nagy stickers are great. These are just a bit sharper.) Bradley worked off my template/crop-lines, which didn’t match his exactly. That resulted in a tiny bit of truncation on the rounded corners. He has now devloped templates for each size. Putting vector art on those should lead to really excellent results with a accurate margins.

Bradley now offers the custom printing service on his site, making him (I believe) the only domestic vendor making low-batch, cubing-specific stickers. They’re being offered on a trial basis, with a limited volume available each week. It appears that only clear stock is available at this time. The pricing is more than reasonable, at about $12 for 60 logos. He has detailed instructions on his site and, based on my past experience with orders from puzzleaddictions.com, is excellent and responsive when it comes to answering questions.

There’s a long overdue sticker vendor review swirling around my head. When I finally get to it, Puzzle Addictions is one of the vendors that I will highly recommend, with its customizable high quality sticker sets (with lots of color and size options). It’s now my go-to domestic shop; I do also highly recommend The Cube Specialists, but the shipping from Germany takes a little while. In the meanwhile, I’m more than happy to highly recommend Bradley’s custom sticker service.