Real NYC Stickers

An iMessage sticker pack featuring authentic photos of the grimy and familiar comforts of home for New York City residents. No sugarcoating, just real.

Real NYC was made for iOS 10’s then-new sticker pack feature in iMessage. It was released in 2016 for 99¢ and included 99 stickers featuring high quality, real photography of things common to the NYC experience.

We wanted to set ourselves apart from the first slate of sticker packs that overwhelmingly favored cutesy illustrations and branded content by offering something cheeky and real.

I used this project as an opportunity to learn the ins and outs of iOS app development, Test Flight and App Store Connect and to dip my toes into Swift development. Sticker packs are absurdly easy to build in Xcode. There’s a template for them when you create a new project and you don’t have to write any code to use it…you simply drag your stickers into the interface and let Xcode do its magic. But we found the process slow and cumbersome, especially as we arranged, rearranged and swapped out nearly 100 assets. Instead, Xcode also allows you to build Sticker packs from scratch in code, using a set of APIs specific to the task. Despite using the default sticker interface for Real NYC, we ultimately went the custom code route because it let us work much more quickly.

Photography and Cleanup

All of the photos were taken by members of This Also and meticulously cleaned up in Photoshop, including creating partially translucent elements so that sticker layering worked beautifully. The photos were kept grimy to reflect reality. We wanted to avoid trite, touristy expressions of the city and focus on the familiar, often unpolished, comforts of home for NYC residents — from the iconic “AINT WET” edit of wet paint signage to broken umbrellas and locked-up bike frames with their wheels and seats missing.

Brian Baker did a fantastic write-up of the process from beginning to end on Medium.

Promotion

The pack was featured by Apple in the iOS App Store as well as in the ad campaign Sticker Fight, which featured people slapping iOS stickers from a mix of packs onto real-world people and objects. The ad is no longer on Apple's YouTube page but you can find it if you try 👀.

Screengrab from Sticker Fight

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Website

To help promote the sticker pack, we built a website. Since sticker packs were a brand new feature that most people would be unfamiliar with, we opted to build a site modeled after iMessage itself, complete with our stickers strewn about, as a way to familiarize people with what this product was.