VCF Midwest Shirt Gallery - or - Adventures in Layout Hackery and a Deep Love of Fonts
Our first shirt was a joke, of sorts. Why does a sub-100 attendance basement meet-up need an official T-shirt? Still, we tried. Minis meet micros with the Digital VT05 terminal and the Commodore font on the front and unreadable inverse QR codes on the back. Printed on black and dark blue shirt stock.

Fonts: Paul Koning's "DEC Handbook", Microgramma Bold Extended, back font unknown (Helvetica?)
A take on the IBM logo and a zero made from a tape reel icon stolen from some kind of dingbat font. The back honors history's greatest achievment in 8 bits as well as our sister show ECCC. That URL was never valid.

Fonts: City, Helvetica, Futura (?), Goudy Old Style
An attempt at the "fading grid" motif and really stretching what you can do with screen print. The quad "VCF" rips off the old (best) Sun Microsystems logo. The back was a fun experiment that actually came off well in print (as did the front). The cryptic code features Conway's Game of Life in the APL language.

Fonts: Adobe Garamond, 12104_DotMatrix, Microgramma, APL2741
An homage to the iconic Digital PDP-8 front panel, taking elements from a few different models. A lot of time was spent getting this design right, but it's not...quite. The back has the first appearance of a schematic diagram on a VCFMW shirt but not the last. The logo is taken from the badge of the Commodore VIC-20, among other models.

Fonts: Helvetica, DEC Handbook, Microgramma
Lovely, lovely greenbar pours forth from a Digital LA120 terminal and somehow print appears on the unfed paper below. The second tracing from a DEC manual. The back design was a labor of love and the artist's favorite, executing the C64 "cracktro" look in ink. Sorry for the misspellings and omissions.

Fonts: Figlet default, DEC Handbook Spaced, GlassTTY VT220, Pet Me 64, unknown "ECCC" font
The best design up to this point and perhaps ever, VCFMW went "artsy" this year with no computers, terminals or disks to be seen. Just paper tape in the four luxurious pastels of 1960s punched cards. The back design is a guru's meditation on 30 years of the Commodore Amiga, the aspiration of many a C64 owner in the 1980s. We even got the legal OK for the "Boing" ball.

Fonts: Pump Triline, Topaz Plus A500
The great gulf between vision and execution: what was going to be a poster concept became a shirt design when time ran out. The "lobster bib" was over 100 square inches of rubbery ink printed on purple or dark green shirt stock (no black this year!) Too bad, because we're proud of the back design, a faithful recreation of the Compute's Gazette masthead.

Fonts: Big Noodle Titling, unknown dot matrix font, Avant Garde Book/Gothic, Profil
Making amends for last year's indulgence, we turned to the music world for inspiration. Fans of a certain age picked up the reference. On the back we finally acknowledged the loyal Atari contingent at the show, as well as everyone's childhood favorite language. The code works!

Fonts: Biondi Sans Light, Eurostile, Digitalism, ATARCC


An example of an effect that came off better in print than on the screen. Many attendees discovered a strange glow in their laundry baskets after the show! And the barcode works, if you're patient. The reverse design is instantly recognizable to those who long ago suffered with only 22 columns.

Fonts: Amelia, Microgramma, Varsity/JerseyPlus, Banco
We never advertised the "telephony" part of the show, but they were there nonetheless. A desire to use the old Bell logo and a need to take up more space with text inspired the ad hoc change. The bell glowed! The back borrows once again from the artist's revered past, this time riffing on the label from his first modem. We used fancy silver ink for the foil, too.

Fonts: Zipper, Niveau Grotesk Black, Helvetica Neue Roman, Microgramma, Futura Light Regular
A real change of scene here for our first "virtual" show. Virtual reality, "vaporwave," cybercrud; it's got a grid, palm trees and a sunset. Not half bad for following a trend. On the back we did our best to map the dates and locations of every node in our family tree, which became a subway map during the design phase.

Fonts: Venus Rising, Futura, C64 Pro, City
Our first shirt to feature a cover star! Forty years of the IBM PC had to be acknowledged somehow, and what better way than to use the worst color palete in IBM's repertoire? People even told us how ugly it was. Two shirts in one year and we ran out of time on the back.

Fonts: IBM CGA screen font
Does arty lightning strike twice? We tried to coax it down to Elmhurst with a real "logotype" this year, using the oft-abused Avant Garde and even some (quite a few) alternate glyphs. That punched card makes us want a Frango Mint. ECCC and the schematic diagram make a comeback on the reverse celebrating another forty year anniversary, this time our beloved Commodore 64: still ready.

Fonts: Avant Garde, Microgramma
Proving we can rip off more than just corporate logos (see also: VCFMW12), this tribute to the ultimate Canadian power trio came out pretty OK, if we do say so. On the back we tip our hats to a 40th anniversay for the third year in a row, this time the obscure Androbot Topo, two examples of which were running at this year's show. The reverse design also explains what "VCFMW" is.

Fonts: Clarendon, Stop


Last Update: Monday, 25-Mar-2024 22:21:30 CDT