Current location:	Anaheim CA
Current mood:	chipper
Current music:	Alan Parsons - "Return to Tunguska"
Entry tags:	ribbons

...She calls for you tonight to share this moonlight. You'll flow down her river...
Continuing the story behind some of the ribbons...


The first ribbon, "Perfect Attendance" I had printed in time for Animé Los Angeles 1; everyone who came to the convention was entitled to one. Then for animelosangeles 2, we printed up "My first time" -- everyone could either get that if they hadn't been to year 1, or could get "Perfect Attendance" if they hadn't missed a convention yet. I'm open to suggestions as to what we should give people who come to year 3 who had been to our convention once before... "I'm back for more" perhaps?

Typfaces: Clarendon Bold and Clarendon Condensed. While subsidized by the convention, these still count as frivolous ribbons. So they get the typeface family that I've used on my silly ribbons before.


In 2004, I joined y'all here on LiveJournal. I'd known about LJ for a while, because of the brit fmz fans (Plokta) who're on here; the original reason I signed up was to have a place to log activity on my web page, primarily when I post more of my photos. johno gave me a "LiveJournal" badge to wear when I saw him at baycon; it occurred to me that LJ ribbons might be nice to have.

While I was working out the design, which as you can see is inspired by -- but doesn't quite match -- the official LJ logo and the badges John makes (you can see that we've managed to chew the eraser off of our pencil), chriso popped up and asked if I could get her a big pile of ribbons that said "Friend of JohnO." I decided to make it mimic the badge/ribbon design, complete with the lower-case "i."

When I got to the LJ/weblog party at the 2004 Worldcon, I learned that there was another way you could display your LJ handle, besides wearing a separate badge or hanging a ribbon off your badge: they had little stickers (the Avery 5167, 80-to-the-page labels) with the little LJ head and a blank space to write in your handle in small print. Not a bad idea -- cost-effective, as long as everyone can write legibly at that size, and it looks more like how your LJ name is displayed on the website. Oh well; I designed my ribbon to match johno's badges, that's all I can say.

Within a year, cogitationitis asked if she could order a few hundred of the LiveJournal ribbons to hand out. So she's been handing them out on the east coast, while I've been playing with them on the west. We ran into each other at arisia in Boston this year. Apparently someone had printed in the program schedule that you could get LiveJournal ribbons at Registration, so I dropped off some for them to give away. Nice lady. We'll be hearing from Lisa again in this story...

Typefaces: News Gothic Bold for the top line, if I remember correctly; that was the best match I could find for the "LiVEJOURNAL" font. (You'll recall I mentioned in a previous entry that in typography, "Gothic" just means it's sans serif.) Comic Sans for "JohnO" (of course), and good ol' Zapf Dingbats for the pencil. I had tried to see if I could find a high-resolution version of the LJ pencil, but gave up after about 20 minutes searching. If I could draw, I would have re-created it myself... You'll notice I'm still pushing the limits of what will fit on the ribbon, there's not a lot of margin on the edges here.


And with that, word got out that I was willing to get ribbons printed for people. "Dr. Arizona" asked for the "Caught Knapping" ribbon, to give people who had purchased her flint-knapped art pieces; and zyxwvut wanted some eric_in_elevatr ribbons (in two color combinations) to give to the crew and participants in his video show that he films in the Baycon elevators every year.

Typefaces: Clarendon Condensed and Comic Sans. I told Eric he could pick his favorite typeface, and that's what he likes. There's no accounting for taste... The "Eric in the Elevator" ribbon also illustrates the first time I had to work around one of the limitations of Paint Shop Pro. When adding text to an image, the quote " and squote ' are straight up-and-down marks; it doesn't make them curly, i.e. open-quote and close-quote. So for this one, I went into my fave word processor, wrote what I wanted, did a screen capture and cut-and-pasted it back into PSP. I had to go back and forth a few times until I got it the size I wanted. In hindsight, I made it too big; I should have made it a smidge smaller, to give us better margins.