Bringing Baby Yoda to Life: Our Post-it Note Tribute

Between the TV show and the opening of the last film in the Skywalker series, the Force is definitely strong in 2020. And there’s one character in particular from The Mandalorian who seems to have captured our hearts. 

We are, of course, talking about Baby Yoda. Whether you’re a fan of The Mandalorian or just an appreciator of the memes, you’ve no doubt come across this intensely popular character over the last couple of months. The world has gone Baby Yoda mad – and our office is no different! 

You may remember way back in 2015 when we let our team loose in the office with Post-it Notes. Buzzing with excitement over the new Star Wars film, they created a number of Star Wars–inspired wall murals. The artwork was a huge success, helping to bring teams together and boost motivation as everyone got stuck into something fun and creative. A study we carried out since found that over half (53%) of workers say that having art displayed in the office makes them feel happier at work.   

So, with this statistic in mind and in anticipation of The Mandalorian’s release in the UK, our Star Wars obsessed team decided it was time for Baby Yoda to join the rest of the family. Armed with stacks of Post-it Notes, a camera, and a vision to bring Baby Yoda to life, they moved some office furniture, found an empty wall space and got to work… 

Stage 1: Planning and Preparation  

The first part of any project is planning. First, we needed to figure out how much space we had to work with. The free wall we found allowed us to build a mural that was 2.58m². With each individual Post-it Note measuring 76.2mm x 76.2mm, it meant our design could be a maximum of 33×33 Post-it Notes.  

With these measurements in mind, we created an icon style, pixel version of Baby Yoda. The finished design used a total of 1,023 pixels, so it would require 1,023 Post-its to build. However, to make things a little more interesting, we decided to animate our finished design. By making slight changes to our wall art such as adding a cup and creating small movements, then photographing our efforts at each stage, we could create a moving GIF. All in all, with these movements taken into account, we worked out we would need 1,317 Post-it Notes in order to bring Baby Yoda to life – in the truest sense of the word! 

From here, it was relatively easy to translate the pixels on the pages into Post-its on the wall. We just needed volunteers, a handful of copy paper printouts and Post-it Notes for the build – luckily for us, we have all in abundance around the office! 

Stage 2: Bringing Baby Yoda to Life  

 On the day, 12 members of staff came together to make the concept a reality, dipping in and out of the build when they had spare time. We kept it simple, using the bottom of the wall as guidance then building one horizontal line at a time in order to keep each line of the mural neat and tidy. It just took a little patience, a good peeling technique to keep the sticky-notes from bending, and a lot of referring back to the digital design to make sure everything was running smoothly.  

The initial build took our team 4.5 hours to create, with the subsequent movements taking a further 3 hours.  

Stage 3: The Finished Product 

1,317 Post-it Notes and 7.5 hours later, and Baby Yoda was born. To see exactly how we did it and to check out the full finished result, take a look at the imagery and video below.  

As you can see, the build was a great success and staff are loving their newest artistic addition to our office space. Share your thoughts on Baby Yoda with us on Twitter using the hashtag #VikingBabyYoda or visit us at @viking_chat, or let us know if you’ve ever created anything unique using Post-its or office supplies – we’d love to check it out!