NEHA Dash Plaque History

[Rabbit Farmer]

I was talking with someone at Okemo who asked about how their car got on the dash plaque for an event. Thinking back to 2015 and prior, I typically use a picture of a car along with some details about the event for the dash plaque. How do you get on the plaque... easy! Bribes or drinks.

I have a lot of old dash plaques (Philo in the 1970's) in the SCCV archives, but I do not have any other older (pre-1999) plaques from the SCCNH or KSCC. I did get some old newsletters from John Reed (KSCC) years ago, but haven't gone through what I scanned to see what I can share that would be of interest to the group.

Smokey (KSCC) and Sim (KSCC) also gave or lent me a number of photos and dash plaques. When I get organized and find the time, I will post the dash plaques here.

What I do have are the plaques that I designed over the years. Often times the creativity was limited to the printing process (used to be one color ink on a colored background). Later, we were able to use three colors (2004) and finally full photos (2010). Looking back at the older dash plaques, some were engraved (expensive!) and others did have multi-colors. There were other options over the years, but we kept going back to the same engravers/printers and used whatever process they had available that was also cost effective for the event.

Times change, designs change..... so, we have a lot of different plaques to share in this post.

I believe all the plaques here were designed by me with the exception of Philo 2004 (the printers provided the background), Burke 2008 (one of the Gale girls drew the bird), Ascutney II 2012, and Ascutney I 2015; I had a hand in all of them to get them ready for the printer, but the design concept was someone else's work. <--- just wanted to say all that so someone did not think I was taking credit for their ideas. Most of the photos I took, but in more recent years, I was given permission from other photographers to use their work. I think the bulk of my photos came from (1) when we had a shortage or workers, so we had driver/workers and from (2) when my car kept blowing up and I ended up working (so sad).

Moving on....

I will post up the older dash plaques in the following post and then post each year in a separate post.

We will see how motivated I get.... only took my 5 years to finally post these. Sounds like that Scirocco everyone has heard of, but have never seen.

Anyway.... enjoy.

Steve

-------------- Added 18-Feb-2019 --------------

You should find all the year-end plaques HERE by year. All of these are the large versions that were used for printing. Feel free to grab yours and use it as you see fit. Enjoy!

[Rabbit Farmer]

The old stuff (pre-2004) //// coming soon ///

From Smokey....

[Rabbit Farmer]

2004

Back in the day, I would tell the printing place (Engraving, Awards, and Gifts in NH https://www.engravingawardsgifts.com/) and they would use some stock clip art to make the plaque.

[Rabbit Farmer]

2005

Basic design. I think I put the images in a MS-Word document and they printed from it.

[Rabbit Farmer]

2006

[Rabbit Farmer]

2007

[Rabbit Farmer]

2008

First time using Photoshop for the plaques... I think previously we could get away with an MS-Word document. These are three-color.... the fourth color is the color of the metal plaque. This means that it took a lot of time to make a full color image effectively a single color (white) where the shadows and lines were removed so that the color of the plaque would take over the responsibility of showing this detail. The text (black) and logo (yellow, black, and white) brought us up to the three colors.

The Burke plaque with the bird was drawn by one of Kevin and Kelly Gale's daughters.

[Rabbit Farmer]

2009

[Rabbit Farmer]

2010











Philo 2010 marked the first full color dash plaque. It was the first time that our printers (Vermont Engraving and Awards in Colchester, VT) were able to do this full color/photo process to make our plaques. While the 2010 Philo plaque was not a photo, it is the same concept that I later used to make the 2010 season plaques. The Philo breakout time of 1:20 was included in the barcode.

2010 Season Plaques

Below are the King of the Hill and Spirit of Hillclimbing awards. For all class winners, they received the personalized artsy-fartsy 'gear' image (one example). These are the first full color/photo images that would be used for the many seasons that followed; still using the same process today.



This is one of my favorite pictures that I took at a hillclimb. Caught the driver's determination and focus while having a blurred background to show the speed of the car. This is from Check 5 at Burke.

[Rabbit Farmer]

2011

Found some of the dash plaques in my e-mail from 2011; slim pickings, but I found most.

Ascutney 1 was 100% handled by SCCNH. I took a quick cell phone photo; I need to find a better way (light box?) to get photos of the plaques that I do not have the original file.










Edit Feb 09, 2023. I found the 2011 Philo Photoshop file when decommissioning my old old computer (two computers back). I got lucky. Posting a good version of the plaque instead of the cell phone photo version. Sweet!