the hood life
humour, life June 11th, 2009
Take a pinch of The Good Life, a classic 70’s BBC sitcom starring Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal and placed 9th on a Britain’s Greatest Sitcom poll. Add one fan of the show with a rapidly approaching birthday, in the form of a Mr. Hood who’s retired and spends a lot of time in the garden growing his own fruit and vegetables. Mix with one software engineer with a rudimentary grasp of Adobe Illustrator and send the results to a photo printing website. What do you get?
The Hood Life
See what I did there? Pretty clever, eh? Actually, it wasn’t even my idea, I’m just the Illustrator jockey on this one. And I can’t even take full credit for that.
The Hood Life - Illustration Close-up
With the help of Google Images and some terribly clever people on Twitter, I was able to find a bitmap image of the original titles from The Good Life and the actual font that was used (we settled on Bernhard Antique, in case you’re interested). The image was too low resolution to use directly and – for some unknown reason – had the wrong “bird” character, so I converted it to vector form using Illustrator’s Live Trace functions and set about cleaning it up and modifying it to suit. Once my fiddlings were complete, a raster version was exported at the correct resolution and uploaded to the photo printers to make the mug.
The perfect mug to hold your tea while you, you know, gardenise or whatever your veggies, Mr. Hood.
John Girvin is a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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June 11th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
A triumph! Well done. I wonder if ‘Hoodo’ (as I now think of him) will appreciate what work went into it? Do report back on his response.
June 11th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Hoodo, or Dizz-ee In Da Hood as he doesn’t like to be known, isn’t given to outpourings of emotion. The mug presentation ceremony rated a smile and an “Ah yes, very good!”, which we were more than satisfied with.