In my last post, I wrote about new custom stickers from Olivér Nagy. Besides some great new custom logo stickers, he and I worked on a sticker template for Rubik’s-brand Void Cubes. The OEM Void stickers have a ridiculous pattern of concentric circles and the color scheme is a bit funky — with white replaced by red and red replaced by a magenta-purple. Re‑stickering to a familiar color scheme made it a lot easier to solve!
As long as I had the camera rolling, I decided to do a quick walk-through video. A lot of folks think the Void Cube is some alien beast when it comes to solves. In reality, with one key parity exception, it solves just like a 3×3. The video walks through that parity issue, which is more fully explained after the jump.
I’ve been a little obsessed with finding the perfect logo and the perfect logo stickers to go with it. I think this is my third or fourth post about logos and stickers, having previously written about stickers from both Olivér Nagy and (the now-defunct) Puzzle Addictions.
Time to order new stickers, I turned to Olivér’s store again. I ordered stickers to match my more refined (drop-shadowed and “glared”) logo. I also developed new variant to match my unique color scheme on white cubes — switching yellow to gray, white to black, and the black gridlines to white to emulate white plastic. As shown in this video, the stickers came out great!
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:
I wrote a few weeks ago about the custom stickers I had made at 123stickers.com. I was fairly pleased with the visual appearance of those stickers, but they were clearly of a different sticker stock than normal cube stickers. As I wrote in my review, the stickers were very thick (probably three times a normal sticker) and the UV coating was especially shiny. Also, I had printed only monochrome stickers (black/gray), so I wasn’t able to comment on 123stickers.com‘s full-color print capabilities.
When I posted to speedsolving.com, someone pointed me to Oliver Nagy’s sticker site. Oliver is based in Hungary, and apparently makes custom stickers for a lot of Euorpean cubers. I contacted Oliver through his site, and exchanged a few emails. He was extremely responsive and easy to work with. Here’s a link to the logo section of his shop. Continue reading →