Current location:	Anaheim CA
Current mood:	tired
Current music:	The Eagles - "Journey of the Sorceror" (Hitchhiker's theme)
Entry tags:	ribbons

...Just when you think she's yours, she's flown to other shores to laugh at how you break...
Part Six. More fancy ribbons from 2005.

"Evil Smof" ribbons are handy for a number of sf conventions. I had some stock roman Good Smof ribbons; they don't seem to move nearly as fast. I had an idea for a fancy Good Smof ribbon -- it would have an oval representing an angel's halo hanging over one of the letters -- but at this point I think I'll just let Good Smof lapse. I may let Evil Smof lapse too; on the other hand, it may be a perennial favorite (we'll see how it goes over at conzilla and laconiv). The interesting thing is, when I set up a table with ribbons for sale at animelosangeles 1, a lot of people who I'd swear don't know what a SMOF is wanted them. Maybe they were thinking of Evil Smurfs? In any event, the ribbons are really groovy on black with red printing.

And "Jalbait" is a hit everywhere I go; when I reordered them from RV Awards after they told me they wanted me to start doing zinc plates for the frequent reorders, it was one of the first ones I laid out as a fancy ribbon. At Animé Los Angeles, we give them away free to anyone under 18, and discourage over-18's from getting one. The reason is, our "Adult Supervision" team (a term I swiped from Windycon) keeps an extra eye out for people hassling the Jailbait kids; we had to throw out a drunk mundane for that reason, in fact, as he was making one girl very nervous.

Typefaces: American Text and Stencil.


I came up with the idea for the plain roman "Nice Kitty" ribbons at animeepo when I saw so many people were running around with cat ears on. You have to be careful not to mistake the Moogles for the catgirls, of course. When I started making the fancy ribbons, putting the cat on this one was a natural.

"I (heart) Yaoi" was one of the more persistent requests I got from the animé fans, and it's a consistent crowd-pleaser. Not just at yaoicon, either.

Typefaces: Clarendon Condensed, and one of Benn Coifman's railroad typefaces -- most of them have this kittycat icon tucked away at the end, like ~ or } or something up at the end of the 7-bit ascii range. And Marigold for "I Yaoi" -- the heart is from Holiday Pi, I just took the outline and filled it in.


For animelosangeles 2, I started making art for the ribbons we'd be reordering. This is the "DJ" ribbon I made up for the people running our dances, like lynxcat on Saturday night. (I had this one printed in January 2006, right before the convention.)

Meanwhile, in 2005 esprix wanted "queer as fen" ribbons. The "queer as folk" tv show is popular enough that in Boston at Noreascon 4, someone was passing around "queer as fen" badge stickers. (And he was marveling that he wouldn't have believed it if 18 years before someone had told him people would be running around with the word "queer" on their badges at the 2004 Worldcon.) Alan wanted a ribbon like this. He only asked for a few, though, so I expect he's run out of them by now.

Typefaces: I wanted to use a typeface for the official Animé Los Angeles ribbons that wouldn't look anything like all the silly ribbons I'd been printing with Clarendon, so I went with Gill Bold Extended (I believe; something from the Gill family, anyway). The "queer as fen" might be the same typeface in lower case; I couldn't find an exact match to the tv show's typography, but we came pretty close. I'll have to double-check if that's a couple of Gill typeface weights or not. And the musical note on DJ -- is that Wingdings? I'm getting tired, and I need to research this stuff some more...