I don’t spend an awful lot on clothes, as they don’t interest me much. My wife makes fun of me because I wear everything until it utterly wears out, and I am quite happy to sew things or fix broken zip fasteners in order to make things last longer.
I almost exclusively wear work-wear from a place (munkasnadrag.hu) that sells clothes for manual workers. I have to milk the goats twice a day, chop wood, look after the fire and walk the dog and therefore need stuff that is pretty durable.
However one thing I do like to spend money on are t-shirts after getting the t-shirt bug from my friend Al Duprés. I hate wearing t-shirts that have things that other people have designed and designing your own t-shirts is a lot of fun.
Over the years I have had three BBC Microcomputer t-shirts. The first (which I got on 27th Sep 2019) was accidentally ripped by my dog Brúnó when he jumped up at me. I immediately had to order another one. The second one, identical to the first, recently wore out completely after five years and my wife is now using it as dusters. That meant it was time to design and order BBC Micro shirt number three.
I order my t-shirts from a Hungarian company called letmicro.com. They were the first people I found when I did a Google search and I have never had any problems with them.
For my first two t-shirts I had the BBC Microcomputer key-strip design (the first version, shown at the top in the image below) printed on the back.
However, this time I wanted to have something different for the design on the rear. I toyed with the idea of having the BBC Master or BBC Master Compact logo on the back (I had owned two Masters and two Master Compacts in my time).
I changed my plans when, searching the web, I saw the BBC Computer Literacy Project logo and I thought it was lovely and very evocative of the era. I also thought that it would work very well as a design for the rear of a t-shirt.
I thought I would have a go at recreating this logo, and at the same time I would make my owl logo look more like it did in this design (chubbier!), and less like the scrawny one in the second version of the BBC Microcomputer perspex key-strip.
Whenever I do any vector design, I use Inkscape. For the owl logo it’s pretty straightforward as it is made up of dots that are all regularly spaced on a grid. I decided to avoid the mistake I’d made last time I drew the owl and used one circle and then cloned it to create the remainder of the dots. That meant any change I made to the “master” dot would be reflected in all the other “cloned” dots so if I wasn’t happy with the size or colour of the dots it was no effort to change it.
I positioned all the dots on a custom grid I had made by hand. However, there was an even quicker and simpler method I should have used involving something called Live Path Effects or LPEs and it’s explained far better than I could in this video by Logos By Nick.
I keep forgetting about Inkscape’s Path Effects as, although they are powerful, they are a bit hidden away. Finally, they are adding some of these tools to the toolbar (such as the very handy LPE tool) so hopefully I’ll remember to use them more in future. The LPE tool is also explained very clearly in this video from the Logos By Nick YouTube channel.
When it came to the text I thought “right, it’s Helvetica Bold, KDE Neon comes with Nimbus Bold, so that will be easy.” However, I was forgetting something. When I came to draw the text on the logo it didn’t look right at all. As you can see below, the “o”’s, “c”’s and “e”’s weren’t rounded enough, the “t” was too short and the “y” looked completely wrong.
What I was forgetting is that back in the pre-digital days you didn’t just design a font and use it for everything. You had varying needs—body text, medium sized text for headlines or large text for posters or covers. And fonts needed to vary to meet those needs. For instance, when text is small, it needs to be spaced more widely than when it is very large in order to be legible.
As this Wikipedia article explains Nimbus came in three variations—T for small text, D for medium sized text and P for enormous text. Later L arrived which was a version of T designed to mimic Apple Laserwriter Helvetica. T and L have the widest letter spacing and P has the narrowest. I had been using Nimbus L Bold.
However, the kerning is something I could handle myself in Inkscape. Even with the kerning fixed, there was something else wrong.
Not only is the P version the most closely spaced, but the ascenders and descenders are longer and the “o”’s, “c”’s and “e”’s are more rounded. This creates more pleasing effect at large sizes and it is these rounded “o”’s, “c”’s and “e”’s that give the BBC Computer Literacy Project logo the late 70s look—it simply doesn’t look authentic without them.
The ascenders and descenders are longer as vertical space isn’t an issue for titles and headings—it’s more important to emphasize the contrast between tall and short letters than try and save space between lines. So I had to dig out my copies of the P or Poster versions of Nimbus Sans.
With the right font installed, I could create the text with no problem at all.
I sent off my designs to letmicro.com on Monday and the finished t-shirt arrived on Wednesday. It looked absolutely fantastic.
Here you can see the Version 3 at the top, and Version 1 (cut off so you cannot see the huge rip) at the bottom. Version 2 is in the windowsill downstairs, still being of use after five years as one of my favourite t-shirts.
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