After receiving my new CMD FD-4000 and virtually completing my CMD hardware collection (I think! I hope!) it occurred to me that my utility disks all looked pretty sad.
- I've been using a Brother Labeller for years for my 3.5" disks. It's kind of sad looking but it's functional and easy. Bonus: the labels are extremely easy to remove whenever I need to do so and leave no residue or debris behind.
Last week before I got sick I decided to pick up some packs of Avery labels. There are two in particular that can be used for floppy disks: Avery 5196 (no longer in print but I got a NOS pack off Ebay) and Avery 5162, which I purchased brand new off of Amazon.
Avery 5196 was designed for 3.5" floppy disks. These are the types of labels that wrap around the top of the disk to the back side. Avery 5162 is sold as a horizontal address label for envelopes, but it also works well for 5.25" disks. You can still download templates off the Avery website for both types of labels in various formats, including Adobe Illustrator, Apple Pages, Word, Photoshop, PDF and even InDesign.
I decided to download the Illustrator template because I had some highfalutin ideas around recreating many of the original CMD logos - none of which are available anywhere online in vector format as far as I can tell. A fun challenge, even for a slightly cooked brain!
For the FD Utilities disk, the good news is there are photographs online of the original disk CMD shipped with the drives. And I have a pretty good understanding of the fonts used and even the software because a while back I went down a rabbit hole recreating the JiffyDOS logo for a video I'd made. CMD actually used Macintosh computers back in the 90s for a lot of their design work as well as Apple and Adobe fonts. I've recreated the entire hardware and software setup on my Quadra 700 including most of the original Adobe fonts (they were hard to find!) but that's a topic for another day. For this exercise I used my laptop. There was no way I was going to do this at a desk.
After a couple of days I got to this point:
- Because why not, I decided to match the © years on each disk to the hardware's release dates.
- Close-up of "RAMLink" artwork in outlines.
I decided to mimic the FD disk for the HD disk. Back in the day a lot (if not all, except the FD) of this software would have shipped on 5.25" disks but I'm moving everything over to 3.5". And I'm making them all individual disks instead of packing them into their own partitions just because.
For fun, I decided to recreate the logos for the RAMLink, SuperCPU and even gateWay - this was the hardest one to do, surprisingly.
Next I needed to do some test prints. With my black and white laser printer, I needed to insert the blank labels face-down in the tray. On the sticker side, there are actually two rows of write-protect tabs on one end. For me, these went towards the back of the printer in the tray.
Since these labels wrap to the back I decided to add a little identifying text so I could identify a disk if it were flipped over.
- Unlike a professional printing press at a service bureau, I think there are ever so slight movements in the paper when it is pulled from the tray. My original intent was to write in teeny tiny type across the very top of the disk's edge the name of each disk. But after several test prints I soon came to expect that my OCD of print perfection as almost a roll of the dice. I decided to just do front and back and leave the top edge alone.
- The paper bleeds a tad, but at the end of the day I'm quite happy with how this turned out.
- Looks like I just entered a time machine and snatched an FD disk from the hands of Doug Cotton himself!
Now I just need to use FCopy to move all of the files I have on 5.25" disks over to 3.5" disks and apply my new labels. At my local Commodore club there are a few others with CMD hardware so I'm going to give some labels away at the next meeting later this month.
Now that I have all of these logos in vector, including a slanted SuperCPU variant and JiffyDOS, I think I might make some "merch" for myself and maybe some friends (not for sale since the CMD copyrights are still in place) later this year. A CMD or JiffyDOS mug? I think I'm going to have to do it. =)
