Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Making signs

Signs

Now we live in the future, certain things have become a lot easier. One of these is producing bespoke signage. Given a computer and printer, anyone can rattle off signs that would have required the efforts of a skilled man with a brush years ago.

So it is in miniature. Running off replacement signs for the Hornby building to replace the ones pulled off the kit when I was stripping paint was the matter of a few minutes work with a desktop publishing package (Serif PagePlus 7). The Hornby logo is lifted from their website and despite being web quality, is more than good enough for this purpose. I like to run off lots of different sizes as despite measuring, it's nice to have options to see what looks right on the model.

The only problem was that the signs came out brown instead of red when printed on the photo quality paper. Telling the printer to clean it's heads solved this.

The final job is to cut them out, run a suitably coloured pen around the white edges and glue in place with UHU.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't that an (R) symbol I see on Hornby's trade mark?

Phil Parker said...

Yes, the Hornby logo is a registered trademark. This means you can't produce the signs commerically without licencing it from them. However, as I'm not even planning to sell the model, I ought to be OK.

Interesting note: the real sign on the front of the real building has the trademark symbol as well. I wonder what would happen if you tried to sell a photos of the building taken from the road?