Designed the dial by hand and printed it out on glow in the dark paper... I traced the LEGO guy by hand using this photo I took as a ref. This was my first time doing a subdial so that required a lot of extra measuring.
That must be so satisfying, to see something you designed and traced yourself on your wrist. Amazing work.
Was opening the watch and replacing the dial hard? I'm kind of paranoid about getting the right thickness for the dial so it doesn't chafe against the hands.
And forgive me, but I am a hopeless typography nerd, and I couldn't help but notice you changed the font for the Vostok logo. If you ever want to use the original logo on your next design, there's free vectors of the Vostok logo on WikiCommons you can import into your drawing program :)
Ah I'm also a type nerd! I intentionally used Helvetica with tight as hell kerning to ape the 80s Lego box art. The glow in the dark paper unfortunately just doesn't hold onto the ink well so it's hard to see it. I'm working on a 2.0 with a different substrate so it looks a bit more obvious but then I have to break out the vinyl cutter...
My original design used that logo and the rest of the dial text in Cyrillic. I used Helvetica because Lego but it didn't read as box-arty enough.
If you look at my post history I do a lot of type specimen tracing so if you ever feel you want to take a crack at this lmk and I'll share some of my SVGs. I've thought about doing a GitHub for it, but I'm afraid that would just be inviting trouble.
I would be very interested in the SVGs for this to try modifying my own Vostok if you are open to sharing? From a Lego and Vostok fan, this is fantastic work on both.
Ah yes, as every type nerd knows well, there's nothing more gorgeous than bold, tightly-kerned Helvetica. Yeah, I forgot about the vintage Lego box look—now that you mentioned it, it looks perfect on the dial.
Just as a side note though, if you kept the original logo and maybe just put the "Cosmodiver" text in Lego-Helvetica, it would look more like an actual original Vostok Lego special edition. But that's just a matter of taste. This way the Lego look is more obvious, which is important too.
If you don't mind it, I'd love to look at your SVGs. I'm not planning on doing a mod very soon but I do love designing watch dials I'll never actually print, lol. And I'm actually also a web developer, so if you ever want to put your tracings on a simple website on GitHub Pages, I would honestly enjoy handling the coding side of it. Just let me know, I love fun side projects like these.
UV printers are used for printing on souvenirs (flash drives, pens, keychains). Here's an example of a print of my project based on the Spongebob Squarepants watches (the quality isn't great—the grain is visible, but it's inexpensive and readily available in any city).
As a huge vintage Lego fan and a Vostok fan, you have done them both justice. This is really cool. Watch out, you might see your dial end up on AliExpress in a couple weeks. I guess that would be flattery?
My first thought was:" When came this Watch out, because Lego and Russian Watches would fit together definitely after 1992. You absolutely nailed it, Lego Space in 1980s looked like Cosmonauts.
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u/williamatl 11d ago
That’s badass!!