{"id":1429,"date":"2020-09-30T23:15:59","date_gmt":"2020-10-01T04:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/makecoolthings.com\/?p=1429"},"modified":"2023-06-16T09:44:06","modified_gmt":"2023-06-16T14:44:06","slug":"week-36-2020-adventures-in-harmless-forgery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/makecoolthings.com\/?p=1429","title":{"rendered":"Week 36, 2020 – Adventures in Harmless Forgery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m a huge fan of Penny-Arcade. I’ve been reading the comic my entire adult life\u2014which also happens to be how long it has existed\u2014but I’m also an active P-A community member, and partake of the duo’s shenaniganry in all its various forms.<\/p>\r\n

Which brings us to PAX, the Penny Arcade Expo. With 2020’s COVIDpocalypse, PAX West and PAX AUS have been canceled, instead replaced with the unprecedented 24-hour a day, 9-day extravaganza known as PAX Online. In addition to openly selling the show-exclusive West and AUS merch on the P-A store, they quickly made some PAX Online merch to offer, including a souvenir badge…knowing that most PAX attendees keep their badges as mementos. I ordered a set with my PAX:O merch, but unfortunately, even the first wave of badges wouldn’t ship until a month after<\/em> the convention, so for me\u2014an absolute freakin’ nerd who wanted a badge to wear during<\/em> the con \u2014that just wouldn’t do<\/em>…<\/p>\r\n

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I had the art for the PAX Online badge from the store listing… So I went looking for pictures of previous badges, hoping to find something I could use for size reference. I found a photo of a PAX South 2020 badge on a USPS label, so I used the height of the barcode as a reference dimension to set the scale in Photoshop’s “Image Analysis” mode.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Reference Images<\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
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From there, I worked it out to 2.75″ by 3.875″ with a .5″ by .125″ lanyard slot. I would later find out that this was close but not quite<\/em> it, no doubt due to perspective foreshortening. The actual dimensions\u2014as I got someone on the P-A discord to measure one of their badges for me\u2014were 2.75″ by 4.00″, and while they confirmed the slot as .5″ by .125″ I’m now confident that it’s probably 15 by 3 millimeters.<\/em> (Since that’s the most common hole that ID badge punches make.)<\/p>\r\n

I worked my usual Illustrator sorcery; playing “CSI: Typography” and meticulously recreating the work of more talented artists, eventually arriving at a template of full-bleed artwork, with upper and lower art combinations for different real and fictional PAX shows, an additional mask layer for exporting screen-ready images, and a cut-layer for contour cutting the art in my Silhouette Cameo 3.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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