The Hunt For The Unknown Sticker Part 2 - The Source

With Nick May of the Degree Partnership office out on an assignment, I sent him an email.

“Yes, I commissioned those stickers with the help of Matt Scotton,” May later replied. If you recall from Part 1, Matt is the public information officer and external communications person for Linn-Benton.

“As far as my contribution goes,” May continued, “I just wanted to have some fun/unique stickers to represent LBCC when I am tabling for DPP events. I get exposed to a lot of cool designs at OSU, so I ended up reaching out to Matt to get the ones you've seen mocked up!”

(Proof Sheet that May sent)

I scheduled a meeting with Nick on May 12, asking more about the stickers and the backstory. The questions I still had:  Why were they made specifically for the Degree Partnership Program? And can other LB students get their hands on some of these stickers? All of which were later answered in a Q&A session with May.

Why were they made?

So I think that it really came from me wanting to just have cool stickers when I was tabling at some of the colleges and other places that we go to for dual enrollment. And at LBCC for a while, the marketing stuff for things like branding was pretty open and people can kind of just do whatever they want to within reason. And so that was a little too much and they had to lock it down. 

Folks like Matt Scotton, who I sent you to, have that kind of leeway with the branding to say what is and isn't OK with things. So I reached out to him because OSU has kind of those holographic versions of Benny the mascot. And I was like, it'd be really cool to do something like that with our mascot Rocky, just to get some fun stuff on the table and then kind of as an offshoot of that, of just him and I continuing those conversations.

My colleague at OSU, Rick DeBellis, had sent me a version that's similar to the sticker sheet that I sent you of OSU stuff. And it was like there was one of them that was like a Van’s slip-on shoe. Little things like that that I was just like, oh that's awesome! What Matt told me was that we had leeway with LBCC branding as long as we kept the colors correct and we weren't trying to do a whole new department logo.

Why were they made for DPP?

We're not like advertising for the college. We're just kind of like showing off cool things about LBCC, basically saying it's a whole program.

Who made the stickers, and why did you choose students from LBCC?

In the graphic design program there's a portion where those students like to work on projects that get rolled back into the college sometimes.

Coming from a background of do-it-yourself, I'm super anti-AI. And I feel like there's a lot of AI art specifically. And there's a lot of times right now where I noticed that places like OSU, for example, don't like to reach out to their population of people there that would be willing and excited to make something for them. They just talk to a computer program. 

So I thought that that would be a really fun way to kind of get this. I thought it would just be a really fun way to empower students to do something cool with their art to get LBCC some cool swag that we can give out to people. And in the process have fun stuff for the table during DPP events. So we ended up with these cool stickers.

I told Matt, “I don't care what the stickers are. I just want them to be something cool that represents LBCC.” Because for me now, whenever I look at those on the table, I show them off to people and then I point and I go, our students made these at the college. And so that's an even cooler thing when it opens the door, giving hope for those high school transfers to expand their knowledge and their artistic skill into possibly a sticker. They see something at LB, telling them that our students made this while they were here. You could do this too, if you want to tell your art.

How do you go about ordering these stickers? How much do they cost?

We order them. That's just what we do. There's nothing secret or special about what we're doing at LB. We're just asking students to make stuff in graphic design and then we send them off.

So we generally do sizes three-by-three. It usually is $152 for 500 for three-by-three stickers and then there's 11 designs on that proof sheet. So doing the calculations for all 11, it would be about $1,672.

There is a lack of student stickers that are available, so would there be a chance to expand them out besides the DPP to other students?

Yeah, I would say that my hope with having this idea was that this was something that Matt could work with to formalize or just like somebody in that department could continue doing because from my perspective, Rocky is cool and all, but it's still the college mascot that you can see. It's a lot more fun to see something different than mascot stickers. I don't personally think of those as DPP stickers. Even so, that's what they were given to us as. It's more like the DPP department wanted cool stickers, and I would love to see people continuing to do that because it's a fun thing.

During campus events, like Welcome Day, would there be a chance of those stickers showing up at those events?

So, that sheet that I sent you is something that whenever someone shows interest in it, I send it to Matt and I let him know that they should be able to order some of those stickers for my department, however it is possible. I intend to order more after I get through all of the ones that I have.

Are there any other stickers in the works?

Definitely. There's one of Rocky with the pride flag, and do like a little handout that's like an Linn-Benton Community College is for everybody kind of thing and make a sheet out of it. So I think there's ideas for it, but to be honest with you, I think that stuff will float out into the ether of our offices.

After our Q&A session, I asked May what the LB-OSU partnership sticker was about, as it made its debut at the “Degree Partnership with Automatic Admission Pathway” event on May 7. 

(Photo copyright LB Commuter, LBCC)

“So the sticker (Benny and Rocky together) was commissioned from the OSU Dam Creative team. It was a special one we did for that event, and we had to get permission to go outside of their usual brand guidelines.”

For more information about the LBCC-OSU Degree Partnership Program visit linnbenton.edu/dpp or contact the LBCC DPP Office at dpp@linnbenton.edu.