In this tutorial I will show you how to design your own shiny stickers and badges, use it for web, print or icons.

Step 1

Open up Photoshop, click on File > New. Set the width of your document to 500px and the height to 500px with a resolution of 72. Create a new layer and call it Sticker Background. Creat a new layer under your background layer and call it BG. The BG layer you can give a background color of #383838.

Step 2

In your Tool Panel, click on the dropdown and select the Custom Shape Tool. In your Properties Panel at the top, click on the drop down list. If you only see a few shapes, click on the right hand side dropdown arrow, scroll down and select all. This should bring up all the shapes.

Step 3

Select a medium grey color, something like this, #a9a9a9. Dont worry about the colors to much for now, we will get there.

Double click on the Seal round sticker shape, it should now be selected. Hold down the shift key to make a perfect circle and start drawing a circle any where on the canvas. It should be rather large like this

Step 4

Now comes the gradient part. Here, we are going to select 2 shades of grey for the background sticker. Set your top color to #ededed and your bottom color to #ffffff. GO back to your sticker background layer, right-click on th icon and click on Select Pixel. Now your Seal should be selected and ready to be “gradiented”.

Step 5

With your Gradient tool selected, drag your gradient from the center of the seal to a 45 degree angel to the left like this:

Control-D to deselect your seal selection.

Step 6

Create a new layer at the top of your sticker background and call it Sticker Top.
On this step we follow the exact steps as Step 3, this time we are just going to make a smaller seal on top of the sticker background with a background color of #1b1b1b. If you did that you should have something looking like this:

Step 7

Now we start with the shiny gradients, some of you new to Photoshop might not know this next step but it’s a nice tool to have.
Right-Click on the sticker top layer and select blending options. In the Styles list on the left hand side, click on Gradient Overlay. On your left hand side you will see the properties change, here is where we want to change the gradient of the top sticker.

Step 8

Click on the gradient box surounded by the red circle, your Gradient Editor should now pop up.

Step 9

At the bottom you will see 2 small color boxes, if you double click on them your select color stop box appears. In you color value box, type in the following value #000000. Close the box and click on the next small box, here we want a lighter black, almost like a charcoal matt black, for this we will use #7a7a7a. As you select the colors you can see your shape color change, you are welcome to change the color to anything you want. *Remeber, we are using the Linear Gradient for this one.*

By now, you should have something looking like this:

Step 10

Now that we have our basic shapes, we can start giving it a gloss look. Select your pen tool and draw a curve over your top sticker like this:

Create a new layer and call it Gloss. Hit your Control and enter key to make you pen tool into a selection. Staying on the Gloss Photoshop layer, select a white color and hit the alt and backspace keys and the, control D to deselect your selection. You should now have somthing messy like this:

Right-click on your Sticker Top layer and click on Select Pixels. Your shape should now be surrounded by the pixel border.

Step 11

In your menu bar at the top go to Select > Inverse. Make sure you are still on your Gloss layer for this one. This will inverse your current selection around your shape. Now, hit the delete key and watch the rest of you pen shape tool color disapear.

Step 12

Take the Opacity down to 8% to give it more of a glossy look.

Step 13

Once again we use the pen tool for some cutting out, this time we want to add a bend to the stick. Select your three top layers and merge them, you should now have 2 layers, your sticker and background. Use the Pen Toll too select the 3rd left top half of your sticker:

Hit Control Enter to turn your shape into a selection. Now, create a new layer and call it Fold. On the sticker layer we use Control X to cut the pice out, that piece we paste back onto the new fold layer. Using our move to we flip the selection around and make sure its inline where we cut it out:

Step 14

Here we are going to add the back part of the sticker with some gradients. Right click on the fold layer and click on Select Pixels. Create a new layer called top shiner. In your Tools panel, choose a white and a very light grey, you can use this one if you like #e9e9e9. Select your gradient tool and in the selected area draw your gradient from top to bottom:

Done!

Here is the part where you can decorate the stickers with whatever you feel like, maybe a price tag button for your site or a social network icon sticker.

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial, please feel free to comment.