While working at Irving Public Library we had a campaign in 2023 to encourage kids (and people of all ages) to be gentle to library books. I’ve been feeling so nostalgic now that Y2K styles, brick red lipstick, and frosty eye shadows are coming back, so I wanted to make something that me in the 90s would have loved. That sort of led me to making a bunch of old retro looking stickers. I would have loved to have actually made these as stickers to hand out, but I was a bit worried they would have been counter productive and ended up on a book. Instead we made bookmarks and a lot of social media.

When doing research for this project I was surprised to find there are a ton of things the library and patrons do pretty naturally to keep books looking fresh. I didn’t really have room for all of that on a bookmark, and I didn’t want to come off as lecturing our patrons. Instead I opted for catchy silly guidelines to offer a gentle reminder of awareness more than anything else.

The dragon’s name is Dewey by the way! Here are some views of the sketches done in procreate.