Create your own custom sticker pack for WhatsApp

Stickers are an excellent way to express your feelings and emotions. Whether it be someone’s birthday, new year, festivals like Christmas or Diwali, or any day, you can find endless stickers to express your mood. Recently, Whatsapp has also launched its sticker packs that were earlier only available on other social media apps like messenger, Wechat, and hike. Since their launch, these stickers have boomed in popularity, and now, almost everybody among us uses them.

In the updated version 2.18, you can find a new option in the emoji section. This new section, called stickers, offers a variety of them in its pre-installed sticker pack. You can download more packages from the built-in sticker store, and the app also allows you to download stickers from third-party applications. But, even after all this, there are a lot of times when you just can’t find the right emoji to express yourself; after all, humans are super-emotional beings.

Anyone with some basic technical knowledge can make custom stickers. And if you are a developer, you can try building your own app with the help of the guidelines mentioned on WhatsApp’s site. The company even encourages independent developers to add more sticker packs through third-party applications. Read on to know more about custom stickers, what all you require to customize a pack for yourself, and how you can do it. You can do this in less than five minutes.

Contents

When can you use custom stickers?
What all you need to know about Whatsapp stickers
The requirements for the sticker to be published
How do you design a personalized Whatsapp sticker?

When can you use custom stickers?

You might think that custom stickers for Whatsapp can only be helpful in conversations to express your moods, but there are a lot more things that you can do with those sticker images:

If you are a part of a group or community, like a sports team, you can create stickers with images of your teammates, your coach, or the sportspeople you idealize, and these can be used to celebrate your milestones.
Sticker packs can also be used to promote shows or movies. Developers can design stickers of shots from the movie or show, or they can make funny stickers of the images of the cast. These stickers can then be added to the Whatsapp store for promotion.
Businesses can also benefit from sticker customization as they can design stickers to launch their deals, offers, etc. They can also use them to promote their products and let people know how to use their newly launched products.
Several non-profit organizations can use custom stickers to sensitize the masses towards social issues like domestic violence or animal cruelty and to promote their events.
Stickers have also been used during the coronavirus pandemic period to promote sanitization and social distancing and to encourage people to stay at home to avoid getting infected with the deadly virus. Such sticker packs have also been launched by Whatsapp in collaboration with the World Health Organisation. The sticker pack, called ‘together at home,’ has been launched in multiple languages like English, Hindi, Arabic, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, etc.

What all you need to know about Whatsapp stickers

You can find the sticker panel just next to the emojis icon in a chat. You have to open it, look for the desired sticker, and tap send. It automatically sends the sticker to that person, and when you see two blue ticks beside the sent sticker, you know that the person has viewed your sticker.
When you send several emojis all together, they get grouped in pairs of two in the chat automatically. This helps to save space on the chat screen.
Just like the emojis, Whatsapp provides a section dedicated to the stickers that you’ve recently used. So, you don’t have to search for your favorite sticker each time you wish to use it.
Whatsapp also allows you to star your favorite stickers, just as you do with important messages. To access that section, you need to open the stickers panel and tap on the star icon.
You can view stickers based on emotion. Just beside the starred stickers icon, you see a heart where you can search for stickers categorized according to different emotions like sadness, love, anger, frustration, etc.

The requirements for the sticker to be published

Apart from the 2.18 version, you will need your custom stickers to meet the following requirements:

They must have a transparent background.
They must be precisely 512×512 pixels.
They must not be more than 100 KB in size.
Also, you have to provide an icon to represent your sticker pack in the app. The size of that icon should be less than 50 KB, and it should be 96×96 pixels.
To make that sticker work on a variety of backgrounds for WhatsApp wallpapers, you should add an 8-pixel #FFFFFF stroke on the outside of your sticker while maintaining a 16-pixel margin between the sticker image and the pixel canvas’s edge.

How do you design a personalized Whatsapp sticker?

You can design your sticker on Android, iOs, or computer, but it is advisable to do it with a desktop app like Photoshop to avail advanced editing tools like edge selection. You can also use apps to create stickers if you are using an iPhone.

First of all, select an image. You can click a picture of yourself with the desired expression by tapping on the ‘take photo’ option and use that or of any object that you wish to make a sticker of, or you can select an image from your gallery or files.
You need to convert this image into a PNG format because that’s what Whatsapp supports. Make sure you have three such images because Whatsapp doesn’t allow you to add a pack with less than three stickers.
Next, you need to get rid of the background of the image. Transparent background is necessary to maintain the aesthetics of the sticker. You can do this with background eraser apps that you can easily find on the google play store. You can also find such tools in the editing tools section of your gallery.
Once you have your image ready, you have to download an app for sticker customization from the Google play store. Search ‘sticker maker for Whatsapp’ app from play store and tap ‘install.’
Open the application and tap on ‘create new sticker.’
Enter the name of the pack and its author. You must do this to make sure you get credit for your customized stickers, and nobody else uses them.
Select the image you wish to convert into a sticker.
Crop the image as per your choice. It could be a square, a circle, or just a freehand cutting. There are some applications that have an ‘auto cut’ feature that detect the outlines in your photo and trims them for you. It is advisable to make a square photo; otherwise, your stickler’s quality will be distorted while being imported to Whatsapp.
Tap on the ‘add sticker’ option and just that! You can add more stickers to the pack, but as mentioned above, you need at least three to make a pack.
Check your Whatsapp for the stickers section, and now you can find your customized stickers that you can share with your friends and enjoy.