This design came about because I was thinking about number plates that went on the handlebars of BMX bikes. I guess they are now “vintage” since they were around in the 1980s. And honestly I probably haven’t even seen one since the 1980s! I did some image searching and found examples of what I was remembering.
Since the plates are “vintage” it made sense to print on paper that had an “old” and “worn out” look, so I used some of the recycled paper I made recently.
I wanted a more modern (and sans-serif) typeface, and the 6 and 9 mirror each other perfectly and seem to fit well into the oval. It’s a clean design with some added contrast of being a non-perfect print on less-than-perfect paper.
Oh, and why 69? Well, I live on 69th street, and I was born in 1969.
Here’s the printing plate I made. I don’t know why I etched so much space around the actual artwork. All that did was make the laser etching process take more time. I’ve been experimenting with a lot of different methods for doing the laser etched plates and I probably had some clever idea and forgot what it was.
I’ll keep messing around with this, as I do enjoy mixing digital fabrication with more traditional forms of artmaking. And creating physical things from digital designs is sort of in my wheelhouse. Cheers!