I’ve always had terrible handwriting. I like to think it excuses my mediocre exam results. Things certainly seem to improve once I left school and was allowed to use computer graphic design and desktop publishing tools for coursework. As a RISC OS nerd, I’d already spent years playing around with software like the built-in Draw (Draw file format) and more advanced tools, eventually settling on ArtWorks, Ovation Pro and TechWriter. At the time (some thirty years ago – ouch), I was very pleased with this 1st year undergraduate essay, and continued to published most of my undergraduate and postgraduate work on this website. I even made a specially formatted version of my Ph.D. thesis and made it available via a print-on-demand service!
To answer your question, yes, I was the only customer.
The point is, I was a graphics design hobbyist and file format nerd long before I was a physicist, and lately I seem to be returning to those roots. Although the tools have changed, as have the formats.
Yes, despite the decades, I can still run those RISC OS apps via emulation. VirtualAcorn works well on Windows, and RPCEmu flies on a Raspberry Pi. But the practicalities mean I’ve moved on to using Inkscape for vector work, Krita for bitmaps, and text-based toolchains like MystMD for documents.
What’s also changed is how much you can do with tools like this.
A few months ago, we bought a Cricut Joy, which is a small computer-controlled cutting machine. You can do all sorts of things with it, including cutting out patterns that you can transfer to hard surfaces and ones that you can iron onto clothes.
There’s quite a lot of folks in the digital preservation community who like doing various kinds of crafting and making.
I wanted to join in and use the Cricut to make something fun…
Floppy Shirt#
The SPRUCE project’s openly licensed digital preservation illustrations are available in SVG format, which is widely supported and can be used to drive the cutting machine. That set of images also includes this stylised floppy disk, which looked like it would work really well.
Combine a variation of that SVG file with the Cricut, load some golden, glittery iron-on transfer material, and you get this!
I wore this at iPRES 2024 and loved it. But next time, and there will be a next time, I’ll probably go for a less subtle combination. Maybe silver on black? We’ll see…
Other Ways To Make#
As I’m planning to leave knitting to the professionals, the Cricut is about as sophisticated as I’m going to get when it comes to making things at home.
Fortunately, there are are growing number of custom creation services that will make all sorts of real things from your digital designs in small batches.
Silly Stickers#
There’s a lot of custom sticker companies, but the one I like the most is moo.com. They make cards as well as stickers, and make it easy to produce lots of different designs.
I spent an evening coming up with a range of designs. Some DPC-related, some more general DigiPres ideas, and some more abstract designs. A few days later, I had a load of lovely stickers. Or at least I thought they were lovely. Which ones would other people like?
I got a chance to find out while attending a workshop in London with about twenty other people, most of whom I didn’t know and who are not directly involved in digital preservation. I (perhaps rather cheekily) spread them out during one of the breaks to see what would happen.
I gathered the remainder and laid them out, ordered by how many stickers were still left so I could tell which ones had gone down well.
The main thing I learned was that my Conway’s Game of Life glider design is too abstract and difficult to communicate quickly! On the other hand, I found out that the ‘born digital great wave’ design that I really really like is also popular with other people, which is pleasing.
Badges & Charms#
There are also services that make acrylic pin badges and even metal charms from SVG files. Combining my existing designs with these services has been great fun…
To give you a better idea of the scale, the metal glider charms are 2.5cm in size. The idea with that design was to make it into a necklace, like this:
I only requested a single metal charm, but Zap sent me three, which means I can also experiment with different final designs. Even so, I suspect I might end up ordering more of them. Perhaps making them even smaller.
Fabrics & Scarves#
The service I’ve discovered that I was most surprised by was Contrado. They do much more than the usual custom creations, like stickers and cards. They can print one-off individual designs on a huge range of fabrics, and even cut and sew them into fully customised items of clothing!
To get a feel for it, I started by designing a fleece scarf based on the ‘born digital great wave’. I’m really pleased with how it came out, especially given it only cost £8!
However, they have a lot of other, very appealing, more complex possibilities.
In fact, they are making five more things for me, right now.
This is in danger of becoming quite an expensive hobby!