Telefusion Yorkshire

A friend of mine, Greg Taylor, went freelance recently and started a new company. When he told me he had registered his company as "Telefusion Yorkshire Ltd", the name was immediately familiar to me.

Telefusion was a sucessful TV rentals business in the 1960s who were based in Blackpool, Lancashire. By the late sixties they decided to copy their TV rentals rivals Granada and Rediffusion and diversify into television broadcasting. They set up a subsidiary called "Telefusion Yorkshire Limited" and successfully bid for the new ITA Yorkshire franchise in 1967. Of course, Telefusion Yorkshire Limited became better known by the name it went on air with: Yorkshire Television.

Several years ago I had asked a friend of mine, Robin Carmody, if he could find a real Telefusion logo for me, and he came up trumps:

A real Telefusion logo

When Greg told me about his new company I forwarded him the example Robin had sent to me as I thought he would be interested to see it. He was and replied "You can draw it for me if you like!". I couldn't resist, so I fired up Inkscape:

My .svg version

Greg then asked if I could create something incorporating the word "Yorkshire". I did this in Inkscape and then distressed it in The GIMP. What I did was add scratches, glow, gaussian blur, lens distortion, rotation, noise, made the lightness of the background uneven and so on.

Add Dorothy Sleightholme to taste

After creating this rather "retro" logo in Inkscape Greg then asked if I could make something a bit more up to date. Eventually, after playing with Inkscape 0.47's filters and an extreme lens distortion in The GIMP I got the TSW-styled image I was after.

Where's Wil Malone?

And this week, I was delighted to see Greg is using it on this website. Best of luck with your new venture Greg - and careful where you go with that pointer!