Iconography: The Headstock Complete

I neglected to talk about the headstock decals I had made (!!!) because it had to be done in a couple of phases.  Well, the cat's out of the bag:

Alright, so the satellite's reversed, but give me a break; it's badass.

A quick word before I get too far: I don't know anything about waterslide decals, or how to go about getting custom waterslide decals made for that matter, but there's a label department at my manufacturing job and I asked if it would be okay to print vinyl labels for personal use.  The same thing?  On our scale of printing, I could get a sheet of black-on-clear labels, they could be custom die-cut (I think plotted is the right word here), and it would cost virtually nothing.  The results were fantastic.  Read and look on:

Let's refer back to the Finishing The Neck Design post from July.  I postulated that I wanted the number 15 on the back of the headstock, inside a circle.  I was convinced that I wanted a logo or a trademark for the main part of the front side of the headstock, and that it should be in the same font as the front cover of Cave In's Jupiter record.  I was leaning toward Big Riff, but hadn't come to a conclusion yet and would give myself the time to figure it out.  However, with the project being inspired so heavily from Cave In's music—and my undying love for both metal and space rock—the satellite logo from Jupiter was picked to go on the circular end of the headstock.  (Is there a name for that part, by the way?)

Same font?  Look at the letter 'V'.  Someone's going to find this blog later and say "Well DUH, Nick, that's _________."  Please do.

That Cave In font.  Just, IMPOSSIBLE to find.  I scoured Google; no luck.  I put up a .jpg of Jupiter on my Facebook wall and asked my Seattle designer friends to tell me what it was; no one knew.  I asked Cave In themselves through Twitter.  The question was put off to Hydra Head, no doubt to Aaron Turner (Hydra Head founder, Isis [the band!], Old Man Gloom, + 500 other projects).  Turner did the artwork/design for that record.  No answer.

Cave In, if you get to read this, thank you for trying.

I put off looking for a font through November and December since that's when the majority of the hardware pieces came in AND when it was Go Time to send it off to Mike & Mike's Guitar Bar for tech work.  The search picked up again in January.  Should I bother with a font at all, and simply pay a designer (plenty of friends to choose from) to make a custom logo?  Maybe that fat '70s style headstock would do well with a '70s style logo.  Big, wavy letters.  But that idea just didn't seem right.  With all of the tech considerations and that satellite logo on the end, I needed the main logo to look modern.

This launched a small-scale study of typography itself.  For example, I like Futura a lot and have used it in the past for my YouTube videos, but I didn't realize that it dates all the way back to 1927.  I had a coworker telling me about all kinds of font design things, which was fascinating (but I've forgotten by now).  And I was scouring the web trying to find a free font that looked sci-fi and retro.  I found some cool stuff, but nothing clicked.

But then I thought...  WHAT ABOUT MOOG?

Why didn't I think about this sooner?  As a longtime fan and user of Moog products, of course I'd be proud to emulate the Moog logo for my own logo—by this time, I knew I wanted the guitar to be definitively titled Big Riff.  I assumed I'd be able to find the font easily—surely it must exist, right?—but to the best of my ability to learn about it online, it looked like the logo was simply designed for Moog back in the sixties and it stuck.  Hmph.

Then, in a moment of blessing, I found this on a message board:

The Moog documentary film, since purchasing it in 2006, has continued to be a source of inspiration to me.  I hadn't made the connection all these years that the font used in the film was based on the Moog logo, but at the same time, I was very well familiar with Ms. Moreno's work:

Highly recommended, whether you're a synth player or [like me] any other type of musician.

So I emailed Angeles Moreno, and she was gracious enough to send me her Moogdula font for free, with one stipulation, "Show me what you do with it!"

It took some additional planning on my part,

But the result turned out much better than I had expected.

Perfect.

Remember the number 15 that I wanted for the back of the headstock?  I decided to go with Futura.  We set it up so that there would be a black circle around the number, but the plotter just couldn't cut it quite right, so I cut out the number by itself:

Fifteen years of pursuing my craft since age fifteen.

By the way, I've got plenty of spares in case anything happens.

...Incredible.  The guitar is now 100 percent complete.  No more additions.  No more tweaking.  It's all there, it all works, and I'm totally satisfied with it.  I'm ready to wrap up this blog with one final post in the next week or so.

By the way, I've actually been enjoying the tone of the Sustainiac when used as a neck single-coil pickup.  It's a new thing for me.  Jangling, open chords just sound great.  I'm thinking about getting a compressor pedal sometime so I can replicate the guitar sound in the verses of the song "Wounded" by Third Eye Blind, which I talked about in my Top Ten Tones post.