Just a few things to add to
CQ-Cumbers' post:
I totally agree that colour matching is very important. Thank you for the reference, I have been aware of the changes in colours and have been using some well-preserved 1980's LEGO that I have as reference. Fortunately, Signature Plastics has a large range of colours, so I've been able to find very close matches. Some of the RGB values are a little off, either on the LEGO reference charts or the SP ABS charts, so the only way to get a perfect match is plastic to plastic. The most difficult colours to match have been yellow, white and grey. My first choices for the blue, red and black matched beautifully. I assumed the white was "whiter" than it really is, with WFK being too "pure white" with too much blue. WCK matches best. WFM and WFO are too dark, although WFO is a decent tone match. WCK is a little more "yellow" than the best preserved white pieces I can find, but it matches very well for the ever so slightly yellowed pieces and is still the closest match, even for brand new white pieces. For the grey, GGM is too "blue" and a bit too light, GTH is closest to the older yellower grey, with GTG also very close, but a little too dark. For yellow, it's been really hard to find a match. The closest in terms of the combination of tone and brightness is YCH, with YY not rich enough, YCE too light, YCF and YBP too dark. Unfortunately, postage takes a while from US to Finland, so every batch of colour chips I order has taken some time to arrive. Anyhow, here are some comparison images in addition to the one posted by
CQ_Cumbers:
The spacebar is a WCK one from the Penumbra Solarised kit.
And a pic from
Clicker showing a DCS cap in trans yellow:
One important difference is that our 1x and 2x trans yellow caps will be in gloss finish, so they should look even more like the pieces used in the sets. I've been meaning to take some more comparison pics and new renders with the new font, but my time has been limited. I also want to get a WA chip to compare in case it's decided we need to go with a purer white, but I suspect it will also turn out "too blue".
So our colours at the moment are:
White: WCK
Black: NN
Red: RA
Blue: BDH
Yellow: YCH
Grey: GTH
Trans yellow: YBR (polycarbonate)
Trans blue: BEW (polycarbonate)
About the font, Here's a render of the current state of the font that shows the current thickness:
We'll be starting a separate thread for the font soon.
CQ_Cumbers is making a new arrow legend to match the arrows on the ships. We'll most likely use the arrows shown in the render for the general font legends, but will use CQ_Cumbers one for this set (it's just one legend so it won't really raise the cost). The instruction booklets for the classic space sets also used Eurostile bold for the step numbers. In order to get the font legends to match the specifications for Signature Plastics' doubleshot molding technique we have had to use a slightly less bold version. It also increases the appeal of the font for more general use as an alternative to Gorton Modified and this is a factor we need to take into consideration for raising the funds to get the font legends cut.
Using trans polcarbonate for legends is possible, but has a number of associates issues. One is the legend support grids which give an uneven look to the legends:
Another is the contrast. Unlit trans legends tend to look dark, lit ones look light. They seem to work best on lighter base colours (darker base colours make unlit legends look even darker since you can't see the material between the support grid as easily). They can definitely be made to work and we will look into it, but they can look ugly if either the wrong colour combination or legend shape and support grid type are used.
Bonus Artisans may be possible and we'll look into it. It's possible that colour matching will prove difficult, though, since they're made from different materials.
