Design Door Decor

This project started about a year ago when we booked our first Disney Cruise. One of the things Disney cruisers do is decorate their stateroom doors. Disney stateroom doors are magnetic and Disney Cruise Line allows passengers to decorate their doors as long as you don't damage the door or use glue or adhesive. So if we were to decorate the door, we need to use magnets.

I felt like, in addition to our favorite Disney characters, we should include our family name and given names. So my plan is to make nametags that look like cast member nametags and make a family plate that looks like the stateroom number plates.

1. Computer
2. Graphics editing program of your preference
3. TONS of reference photos
4. Magnetic sheets with adhesive backing
5. Color printer
6. White paper
7. Scissors

The most important part of this project is actually deciding on a style or object you want to imitate and find good reference photos. The cruise we're going on is one of the first on Disney's new ship so at the time I made these decorations, there weren't that many photographs of the elements I wanted to imitate. About half of the photos above come from video posts on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube.

I actually downloaded a 3d model of HeiHei and posed it to look like the famous "screaming intensifies" image because our daughter wanted to maybe choose HeiHei for her character but the scream in the movie is either in close-up (doesn't include the full rooster body) or in an extreme long shot.

I liked the coat and arms pose for Grogu in one reference shot but the frog creature in his mouth in another. So I combined the two.

In programs that have a built in "perspective skew" wizard, use the wizard to define points and "square up" the image. In programs that don't have a built in perspective tool, but does let you distort layers with 3+ points, create a top layer with a rectangular shape and then distort the image beneath so some feature in the photo approximates the rectangle.

Several of the stateroom door photos included a rectangular rivet shape embedded in the door that we can use to make the corners of the rectangle match with the rivets.

Trace the elements that you want in your final design with vector shapes. Keep them as simple as possible. In my designs for the nametags and family plate, I only had to trace half or a quarter of the design and then mirrored them because the designs have symmetry.

Because I couldn't find the typeface used, I decided to use a typeface that "felt" similar. I think we settled on Palatino Linotype.

Print on paper that matches the dimensions of your magnetic sheets. I messed up the first time and had to duplicate several of the designs on subsequent pages. (This is why you'll see identical nametags.)

We had extra blank magnetic sheets left over (we still do) but I decided it might be fun to add words to our magnetic poetry set. So I added several personalized words and some more from "high frequency" English words.

Remove the adhesive backing on your magnetic sheets and carefully place your printed designs so they fit on the magnetic sheet without overhanging or wrinkles.

Using your sharpest scissors, cut out your designs. The magnetic sheet material is thick and soft so it may "gum" up your scissors occasionally. The sharper your scissors the cleaner your edge will be. I chose to include a small margin on my magnets. (Mostly to strengthen thin parts of the designs.)