Syd Weiler’s Trash Doves sticker pack turned into an internet phenomenon earlier this year. And they almost didn’t make it out of her notebook.
“I wasn’t even going to post them. They were just four-minute little sketches [of pigeons] I’d done sitting in a park in Minneapolis,” Weiler says.
One day, she tweeted the pigeon drawing and the next morning it had a couple thousand likes and retweets. “I thought ‘oh cool, people like those pigeon drawings, but whatever.’ It’s always the little stuff people take and run, not what you’ve worked hours on,” she says.
Then Apple went and released a new iOS, and allowed independent artists to make “stickers” – basically drawings similar to emojis – as part of the update. If you’re wondering what a sticker pack is, think of the narrow, shrink-wrapped packages you might have found at a gift or craft store and stuck on your notebook or Trapper Keeper back in the pre-internet days.
So Weiler and a friend decided to make a weekend out of each creating a sticker pack and uploading it to the App Store. This happened in September. For $1.99, you could buy a pack of 25 (37 thanks to an October update) pigeon stickers for your, as Weiler described it, “coo conversations.”
The stickers, showing a purple pigeon in various situations, like eating a baguette, a doughnut or sliced bread, can be inserted into iMessage conversations on the iPhone. One pigeon lies atop a loaf of bread with the caption “loafin’ around.”
It was “a little, fun, weekend project,” that “made people happy,” until she figured out how to put the stickers on Facebook.
That happened in late January, and within a couple of weeks, people all over the world had heard of and seen the Trash Doves.Sure, they were being inserted into Facebook messenger conversations and people were getting a kick out of them, but they also started showing up on coffee mugs and T-shirts without Weiler’s permission. The purple pigeons were appropriated as the mascots of some unsavory neo-Nazi groups.
Someone also mashed-up the image of a head-banging trash dove and a dancing cat. The lewd 22-second animation received over three million YouTube views in just a few days. The trash dove officially became a thing.
Why did it happen like that? Weiler thinks people just want something cute and fun when the world seems like a confusing and scary place.
“So much of what you see online is negative, when something happy, cute and funny comes along on your feed, that’s what you latch onto,” she said. “It feels like a life raft, at least for me. I think that’s what happened to these. They were simple, they didn’t have a larger meaning. It was funny birds with funny bread puns that they could use to send to friends to make their friends smile and laugh.”
But when the doves started showing up all over the place, Weiler decided it was time to protect her property. She spoke with 99U after spending a couple of months and thousands of dollars with a lawyer trying to protect her images.
“It was…
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