Retro QSL Card Design

I made a QSL card like the ones I had in 1984.

The first weekly assignment of the 2025 Ham Radio Challenge is to create a QSL card design. I thought it would be fun to recreate the cards I got after I was first licensed as KA8UTP in 1984. Here’s what those cards, designed and printed by George Vesely W9SKR, looked like:

My original QSL card (1984)
My original QSL card (1984)

The image above is a scan of the only remaining copy of my original QSL cards from 1984. It is badly damaged from having spent the last 40 years in a damp basement. I was able to clean it up somewhat using Photoshop.

And here is my attempt to recreate it using my current callsign.

My attempt at a modern reproduction
My attempt at a modern reproduction

There were two tricks to making this card. The first was reproducing the great circle map in the background. I’ll be honest, I didn’t spend a lot of time on this. I wrote a quick and dirty Python script to spit out something close.

The second trick was finding fonts to match the originals. I think I came close with these:

How did I do?