Current location:	Santa Ana CA
Current mood:	chipper
Current music:	Echo & The Bunneymen - "Bring on the Dancing Horses"
Entry tags:	ribbons

She floats like a swan -- Grace on the water. Lips like sugar, lips like sugar...
Christian suggested I make a web page for my ribbons, and talk about them. It'll take me awhile to write it all, so I'll serialize it here.


Here are six ribbons, including four that have been discontinued for one reason or another.

"Ask me about Animé LA" has been replaced with "Meet me at Animé Los Angeles." The second version is more suitable for handing out to anyone who wants one ("meet me at" instead of "ask me about").

Our official name for animelosangeles is Animé Los Angeles, not Animé LA; this is because LA is ignored by most search engines, and also animela.org was already taken by the time we registered our domains, anime-la.org and animelosangeles.org. Lessons: check for domain availability, and how a search engine treats the name of your organization, before you settle on the name for something!

Also, a number of people thought it meant "Ask me about anime" and ignored the LA portion. Finally, this was one of the first pieces of art that I laid out for the ribbon company: as you can see, there's not much of a margin around the edges. A little more of a gap is helpful, it turns out.

Typefaces: I used Clarendon Condensed for "ask me about", and the rest is Marigold and Bremen Bold. People with "Pan-Galactic Publishing" shirts will recognize Bremen Bold. I decided I liked Marigold so much that I've been using it for everything that's Japanese- or animé convention-related.


"Chaz for TAFF" and "Sparks for TAFF" were printed for the 2005 and 2006 TAFF races. If either of us ever runs again, I can print more; otherwise, they're obsolete. (I have a few left, maybe they should go into a fanhistory exhibit?)

Typefaces: Clarendon Extended, and regular Clarendon Bold; with Blado for the "for." By the time I made these, I'd pretty much settled on the Clarendon family for most of the text on my ribbons. I'd been fooling around with different typefaces for different ribbons (very Victorian or Old West playbill of me, I know), but by this time I'd decided they'd look better overall if they had a more consistent look. A little italic (the Blado) seemed to be called for in these ribbons, though.


Finally, we have "Kawaii" and "Chibi." Both are Japanese words for "cute;" I understand that chibi has more "cuddly" connotations. I had ordered both of these from the company using their regular stock typefaces, and had decided they seemed to be popular enough to warrant getting the custom art. But once I had both of them, it seemed that "Kawaii" wasn't as popular as "Chibi" and it felt redundant to have both. So I'm not printing any more "Kawaii." If you want to buy some to hand out, though, let me know and I'll be happy to order some for you the next time I place an order.

Typeface: Marigold, as described earlier. In the first one, I made sure there was a lot of margin; in the second one, I made "Chibi" as big I thought would fit comfortably on the ribbon