I hit the retro PC hobby hard about a year ago, having a small collection of hardware sitting around taking up space before that. I still have some of my original media, but can't vouch for the whereabouts of all of it. (I have, for example, the case for VB Professional 4.0. No idea where the disc went.) I decided that maybe I would be better off sourcing NOS disks and laying fresh images on them instead. After all, some of that media had definitely seen use.

But, for the last year, I've had one of those plastic floppy organizer boxes full of unlabeled disks, and a few in piles or various drives. I would resort to storing alternating sets (like SB, then SB Pro, then SB16) upside down just to tell them apart while in the box. My memtest86 disk in particular got shuffled around so frequently that I had to keep track of it by remembering "it's the one with the write-protect tab set." So, I finally decided it's past time to order a pack of labels, create a template, and carefully re-create the labels from scratch.

Google's image search really helped out. The Internet is great -- you can type in "<company or product> logo svg" and nearly always come back with a perfect, scalable vector image. The rest came down to matching fonts as closely as possible to what I had on my computer, then tuning kerning, or converting text to Bezier curves so I could modify the aspect ratio or minor details on certain letters.

Here's the end result (first disk from most of the piles shown here):

Not everything turned out perfect. My printer can't quite hit the left-most edge of the label, so the ones with color had to be moved to the center or right column of each 3x9 sheet. Also, most of these are actually supposed to be front labels only, but the wrap-over type is all I could find on Amazon with permanent adhesive. The sheets also have zero margin between labels, so spill-over or razor-thin uncolored lines at the extreme edges were inevitable unless I wanted to resort to only using 6 or even 3 labels per sheet. (Which probably would have been fine. It was a box of 630, I think. I have uh-plenty left over.)

Also, some labels are approximations if I couldn't find the exact font, or even a reference image of the exact label. I got pretty close by thinking about the company's marketing style -- Microsoft is going to use TNR and Arial. IBM is more of a Helvetica house.

In some cases I improvised small or even significant details merely for a better outcome. The dates and part numbers aren't all accurate (but are, whenever I could verify them.) Either way, I'm happy with the result, and glad that I don't have to play "guess what's on this one" anymore.