Stickerbombed: Star Labs StarBook Mk VI

Especially with laptops being an attractive target for thieves at airports and touristic areas, I not only enjoy telling a story through the appearance of my devices, but I also find customizing the appearance a good way to deceive snatchers into mistaking these items for something of lower and potentially uninteresting value.

Unlike the average tech bro that collects stickers of their favorite tech corporations and stacks, only to arbitrary stick them onto shiny but broken hardware, I prefer to carefully plan my stickerbombing and create a well-crafted collage that tells a story. For that, I not only order specific stickers but also cut them into new motifs. Instead of Silicon Valley logos, my works usually contain imagery that are reflective of personal life events, social topics, and sometimes political and conspirational satire.

The stickers for this project came from Redbubble. On Redbubble it is possible to order stickers in low quantities, meaning even just a single one. As I’ve done previous collages with them (e.g. for my old MacBook, as well as an ASUS laptop I had previous to that), I figured that I’d go with them for this one as well. This time, however, I decided to give their Transparent stickers a try, as I would otherwise need to manually cut the white border of the Matte die-cut stickers myself. With previous projects this was the most time-consuming and tiring task, hence I figured that if Redbubble now offers the same stickers with a transparent border, I’d just go with that.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the Transparent stickers don’t only have a transparent border, but are also generally non-covering. Hence they are not ideal for collages. And because neither their blog post nor their FAQ informed me about this, I contacted their support and sent them proof that these stickers don’t look great when glued onto dark surfaces or backgrounds with patterns. After some back and forth they offered to re-print the order in their traditional Matte finish.

Even though I’m not fully satisfied with the look of the Transparent stickers, I will keep the collage for now, as I wouldn’t want to redo it with the regular Matte stickers only to throw away the current version. I’ll stick to this for as long as the stickers will survive and redo the project when they start coming off or become unrecognizable due to wear and tear.

If you like this sort of art and are looking for further inspiration for your own projects, you might enjoy the books by Stickerbombworld, as well as the c/stickerbomb and r/stickerbomb communities.