Die-cut vinyl

A sticker is not a picture, it is a shape a machine cuts out of vinyl — and what makes it read as a sticker rather than a printed rectangle is the pale border offset around the artwork. So the border is not decoration on these; it is the thing being manufactured, and it is the only part of the range that had to be worked out from scratch.

The method

Nothing here is drawn twice

The cut path is not drawn. Every part of the figure is fattened by the border width and painted in the border colour underneath the artwork — and the union of those fattened parts IS the die line. A rectangle or a circle is fattened by expanding its geometry, which is exact; only a curve is fattened by stroking it, because a Bézier has no closed-form offset.

That is worth doing rather than drawing a cut path by hand because the die line cannot then fall out of step with the art — it IS the art. Put a different hat on a character and the border follows it, on every size, without anyone redrawing anything.

Two useful things fall out of the construction rather than having to be policed. Every corner ends up with a radius of at least the border width, so the tightest curve on the cut path is the border itself — pick a border wider than the cutter's minimum radius and the cutter is satisfied by construction. And any gap narrower than twice the border closes up. That is not a defect: the slot between two legs gets bridged rather than cut, because a one-millimetre neck of vinyl tears the moment the sheet is weeded.

Not a separate library

The border is a property

The stickers above are pre-composed, one per character. That is fine for a range and no use at all for a figure nobody has built yet. So the border is also a RIG — the same figure, the same inputs, one word different, and it comes out die-cut.

It needs no engine change, and it turns on two facts about the rig: a profile's slot list IS the paint order, and two slots may bind the same input. So a profile declaring dieBody, dieEars, … before body, ears, … paints every halo and then every piece of art — the two passes a border needs, expressed as data. A caller passes its figure exactly as before.

35 stickers

One for everybody

Generated from the same cast file and the same rig the characters themselves come from, so the sticker range is not a range anybody maintains — a new character arrives with a sticker already made.

A second product

The kinds sheet

Many kiss-cut stickers on one backing, which is a different thing from a page of stickers: the gap between them is set wide enough that two die lines never meet, and that is what lets the whole sheet be cut in a single pass.

No drawing software

Print-ready, in this repository

Every sticker above exists as a real SVG sized in millimetres, with three named layers — border, artwork, and CutContour — and a single closed cut path stroked in 100% magenta, which is the convention a printer's cutter expects. 52 files, generated by tools/build-print-pack.py.

The cut path is traced from the rendered die line, so it is derived from the artwork rather than drawn beside it and cannot fall out of register with it. It is a dense polygon of a few hundred points rather than a fitted curve — a cutter interpolates that exactly, and a curve fit would be a guess wearing the clothes of precision.

Colour ships as a table alongside. The hex values are authoritative; the CMYK column is a naive conversion for reference only, because a correct one needs the press's own profile. Nothing here claims a Pantone match, and saying so is cheaper than a reprint.