Recreating/preserving Sinclair box packages
Posted: Fri Nov 23, 2018 7:31 pm
Don't ask me why, I really like the Sinclair software box packages. Not that their are really beautiful, but like most Sinclair stuff it's unique and it resonated with me (still does). Actually the ZX Spectrum ones have been my focus and since I have all originals published - and thought it would be nice to have/recreate them as scalable vector graphics… that's as far as I got with them. On the QL side things I found it's more difficult as it's not even possible to get hold good photos (bad scans of manuals are easier to find), let alone getting the packages themselves. They should not get lost, and ideally we'd have a gallery of them somewhere.
So during a particularly boring conference call last week (it takes only the other half of the brain) I started to look around and see how far I could get… Let me first make it clear that I'm not at all artistically talented, but I have the right tools and text layout and design, so that's a start.
I found a reasonable photo of the QL Home Finance package online (I actually have tiny manual and binder myself). Working in Affinity Designer on Windows, first load the photo and then bit by bit place vectors on top of it. The texts are relatively easy as "Saxony-Serial Medium" is the signature QL font - only the kerning and character spacing is slightly different, and some glyphs vary a bit, but not too much to matter. The stripes on the box are easy, the logo from Buzzzz fun to recreate. Only the main artwork is a pain and is too hard to re-create manually, though a good vector tracer like Vector Magic can help a lot (unfortunately, the source image is not good enough, so I recreated the coins manually, hopefully I can replace it eventually). But for a first try I find it pretty decent:
Once you have the basic box it's obviously not much work to adjust the image, logo and text to come up with a new box. So when Ralf posted the photo on the QMon thread I couldn't help myself. First thing to do was correcting the perspective, and then there is the reflection of the flash, which is only a problem for the artwork. Luckly I have the QL Macro Assembler manual and it uses the same on the first page, so I used a photo from that to vectorize.
The vectorizer actually did an amazing job in tracing the original artwork image . I used a slightly differeny grey just for experimentation, I think it should be easy to find the original Sinclair Pantone silver...
The sourcefiles and SVGs will go to GitHub eventually. My plan is to re-create each original Sinclair software box, and maybe others in future (Computer One is high on the list). If you have images or would like to see a particular one let me know. (no promise or timeline though).
O
So during a particularly boring conference call last week (it takes only the other half of the brain) I started to look around and see how far I could get… Let me first make it clear that I'm not at all artistically talented, but I have the right tools and text layout and design, so that's a start.
I found a reasonable photo of the QL Home Finance package online (I actually have tiny manual and binder myself). Working in Affinity Designer on Windows, first load the photo and then bit by bit place vectors on top of it. The texts are relatively easy as "Saxony-Serial Medium" is the signature QL font - only the kerning and character spacing is slightly different, and some glyphs vary a bit, but not too much to matter. The stripes on the box are easy, the logo from Buzzzz fun to recreate. Only the main artwork is a pain and is too hard to re-create manually, though a good vector tracer like Vector Magic can help a lot (unfortunately, the source image is not good enough, so I recreated the coins manually, hopefully I can replace it eventually). But for a first try I find it pretty decent:
Once you have the basic box it's obviously not much work to adjust the image, logo and text to come up with a new box. So when Ralf posted the photo on the QMon thread I couldn't help myself. First thing to do was correcting the perspective, and then there is the reflection of the flash, which is only a problem for the artwork. Luckly I have the QL Macro Assembler manual and it uses the same on the first page, so I used a photo from that to vectorize.
The vectorizer actually did an amazing job in tracing the original artwork image . I used a slightly differeny grey just for experimentation, I think it should be easy to find the original Sinclair Pantone silver...
The sourcefiles and SVGs will go to GitHub eventually. My plan is to re-create each original Sinclair software box, and maybe others in future (Computer One is high on the list). If you have images or would like to see a particular one let me know. (no promise or timeline though).
O