Yesterday, MBS (@mbransons, on Twitter) tagged an earlier post here from a year ago with his post, “Hey, DS106radio, Just because …“, noting that he had re-created Andrew Allingham‘s epic logo design for #ds106radio in Illustrator so that the art could be used for higher resolution projects. Michael encouraged me to revisit the second-year anniversary ds106rad.io domain re-branding, and provided access to both his new Illustrator .ai file as well as a nice GIFfed version. (I’m really keen to read more about his process for tracing existing art to create such colour separated vector artwork.)
Fiddling with the Font
Noting that I’d never been completely happy with the font clarity of the “Your NEW Old Radio Friend” sub-title that I had added at the time, I indicated that I’d also take the opportunity to see if that could be fixed — hoping that it could read more neatly when scaled to small sizes, as I felt this was a problem with the 2013 logo. Michael was gracious enough to also reference the Coalition font by TracerTong (available from dafont.com), which had been originally used for the ds106 radio logo title, which I decided to try for the sub-title, too. As it would turn out, not having the Coalition font a year ago had me adjusting the existing text in raster form, and creating the “dot” for the rad.io using a selected circle of existing lettering — tonight I have discovered that the period within the Coalition font is square in outline! So! In situations where you might not be able to easily distinguish differences in image quality between the original raster art and the new vector-based art, look to the shape of the rad.io “dot” — if it is square, it is the new 2014 version!
I needed this on a T-shirt. And how about a poster?
Now, I’ve never had one of these original ds106radio T-shirts like Grant and Jason and Tina, and so I asked Michael if it would be okay to post the shirt design to the ds106zone store on zazzle.ca. Michael said yes, and so, assuming everyone’s kind permission, I’ve created an option to order the shirt via zazzle. And, for those who might like to display their ds106radio love on the wall, I’ve also mocked up a poster with a similar design to the shirt, padding out the shirt design to provide for a standard 24″x36″ poster.
A note about Zazzle, getting the price deals, and discount coupon codes: Zazzle has online stores for a various country domains around the world, and offers discounts of up to 50-60% from time to time. It is on these days that I place my orders from Zazzle. Two-for-the-price of one for T-shirts or water bottles puts the one-off manufacturing costs at a much more acceptable price point. Nigel (@easegill) confirmed that there is a New Zealand Zazzle store, but that the coupon codes that are offered from time to time are generated by the local country store and are not necessarily transferable. You should be able to find the ds106zone store by searching for ds106zone in your corresponding country’s Zazzle store, but you may need to use a country-specfic discount code. The best way to get these is to sign up an account with Zazzle store for your country, and opt in to receive email notices of specials. Typically, you will have between one day and three to purchase with a discount code (often there are holiday- or weekend-specific specials, and from time-to-time, flash sales that last for a few hours).
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