Hi! The Twenty collection is my submission for the CS20 event. I've been playing Counter-Strike a lot for the past 18 years and I've seen my big brother play the first 2 of those 20. I've grew up with CS, skipped class from school, had my local team, went to tournaments and so on and I keep playing it today so this event means a lot to me as it gives me the chance to celebrate all those years using my skills as an artist, which makes me really happy.



When the event was announced I had one thing really clear: there was no way that I could fit 20 years of Counter-Strike in your average collection of 7 to 9 stickers with its variants. There's just too much and even after doing an extensive curation my ideas were well over 30, and they all were relevant to the game, they gave shape to what Counter-Strike is today.

So I came to one conclusion: in order to create a collection that properly represented and celebrated 20 years of CS I was going to need a lot of unique stickers. The current number of slots in a sticker capsule is 20 and we're celebrating 20 years of Counter-Strike so it kind of clicked in my mind, it made sense to me. So... twenty stickers.

Instead of doing 8-9 stickers with their holo/foil counterparts I created a capsule where every sticker is unique. I balanced it so it would follow the standards of the previous released capsules (a good ratio such as 9 paper stickers, 8 holographic stickers and 3 foil stickers).

Doing a capsule like this has its pros and its cons:


It allows me to divide the stickers in 3 different themes:
- Paper stickers are about CS culture, game modes, fun maps, memes and so on.
- Holo stickers represents all the iconic Counter-Strike maps.
- Foil stickers is about the most iconic imagery of CS:GO, the factions and to properly represent with a sticker 20 years of what is, in my opinion, the best FPS.

· I can design each sticker to fit its type. I'll go into further detail with this when I get to the stickers categories.

· I can fit almost all the ideas I wanted not only because they are 20, but because I can fit in more elements with secrets in those 20 stickers using the scrapping system that I pioneered in a capsule with the Skill groups capsule.


· Is just too much work.

So I ended up going for it, I was short on time so I worked as much as I could over the past 2 months to make this collection happen.


Paper stickers are about CS Culture: from memes, to maps where we spent hours and hours and hours or game modes. By not being tied to do a foil or holo variation of these stickers I could entirely focus on "Paper quality" sticker designs, such a "Hello my name is" sticker which I suggested with quite a lot of success on Reddit 10 months ago or more cartoony designs where I can go a little further with the details since they are not going to have 3D volume with metalness (foils) or color changes (holos) that would make them them harder to read at distance.

They are meant to be fun and "Paper quality" while trying my best to make them desirable to the community.





Holo stickers are about the most iconic Counter-Strike maps. Maps in my opinion are the true "characters" of Counter-Strike. They've been evolving and transforming over the past 20 years yet their personality remains.
Here's the thing about holo stickers: we all LOVE the Kato 2014 and 2015 stickers. And here's why: regardless of whether you're a fan of the team or not, it's because they are made of big shapes (team logos) with very noticeable color changes. You can see in Youtube thousands of videos of CS players inspecting their guns with said stickers and moving the camera around just to see the color of the sticker change.

I don't know if there's going to be a collection in the future similar to the first ones but that's what the community wants. And I tried my best to deliver. They have bold, big shapes and most of them have a lot of color variance. Each one represent in a different way their map. I'll explain each one on their corresponding individual page.



Most of the holo stickers use a normal map that helps guiding the holospectrum thru certain surfaces. This is something new! I'll go further into this tomorrow.





Foil stickers represent visually a big period of time. I did The Howling Alpha, representing the very last inclusion to Counter-Strike to date and Dragon Lore, representing the pass of time, something ancient. Both of them are very iconic and valuable to the current Counter-Strike players (The Howling Alpha being based in Howling Down and to my knowledge the hardest rank to achieve today) and Dragon Lore, the most valuable and loved AWP and part of cbble. The two of them have a history and I think they complement each other greatly.

And in the middle of them, the CT and T factions, the players. An amalgam of both emblems, celebrating the 20th anniversary of our game.




There are a few images that I want to upload and write some insight about the design and decision making for every sticker before calling the presentation done, I'll do it asap after resting over the weekend.

I hope you like it !!!

PS: I see some of you concerned about the stickers being released by Oct. the 8th, being the 7th the deadline. For the submission it registers my local time (Europe) which was October 8 around 7am. At that hour I started the submission process which was midnight of Oct. the 7th in Seattle and like for every Valve held contest, event or similar their timezone is the one of reference. It took around 1-2 hours to submit 20 stickers (I have to do it 1 by 1).

The collection was set on private until Friday the 11th which was the day when I finished the presentation for the stickers, making it public by then! :)