OVERVIEW
KiBRIT is a passion project that took a month to finish. Its goal is to be a virtual collection of all the vintage Bulgarian matchbox lebel designs I could get my hands on and preserve them forever on the internet in the form of a virtual gallery.
You can read more details at the bottom about the strange rabbithole I went down as I researched and gathered the materials for this project. (it's mildly interesting)
Full collection of 250 unique designs
HOW IT WAS MADE / STORY
About the designs / As I was looking through the designs I noticed that since these we're printed half a century ago, around the 50's - 90's (roughly), the colors used are very simple and mainly saturated reds, yellows, greens and blues. The designs themselves were usually either a form of AD, celebratory design or a caution message, mainly about smoking being harmful. Which fits the era perfectly.
Gathering the designs / At first I thought it would be a simple task, just do a quick google search and choose from all the designs i could find. Boy was I wrong.
Since it's only limited to Bulgarian label designs the search was quite difficult from the beginning, there aren't many resources about such an obscure topic. At the same time Bulgarian online space is very small compared to other countries, by that i mean sites, forums etc.
The bizarre sites / I sourced all the images, which I later on turned into the actual textures, from a variety of sites. The most bountiful one was an auction site where I found a strangely large amount of old matchbox collections being sold, some reaching up to 150BGN(~76 euro) !
Another beast we're the weird long dead forums, one of them had a weird code that people used in all posts, sadly my deciphering skills are rusty so i couldnt crack it. A lot of forums required you to be a member in order to view images, which is the only reason i was there. But when I tried to make an account, I couldn't. Looking a bit into it, apparently the servers that the forum used for accounts basically didn't exist anymore, so the forum is forever locked and will lay still and silent until the main server dies one day. Anyway, couldn't find any images there sadly.
Many images existed as thumbnails on google images, but when I tried to open them it lead me to a dead website. The only remaining evidence of it's existance being those tiny tiny thumbnails still alive on some random google server.
251x200 !? AND on top of that - extremely blurry! That takes us to the next section.
Making the textures / As I mentioned, most images were HORRIBLE ! It's as if people were dancing as they took the pictures. So I had to go through some hoops to get the best possible results. I downloaded as many images as i could find and sorted through them and picked the ones who had an acceptable amount of detail. I ran them through a denoiser and an upscale software to bring out ANY detail i could, i was desperate. After that followed a many hours of manual color correction and tinkering because all images we're completely different and it was impossible to mass edit them. After polishing them all i stitched them together onto a few texture atlases and i took a deep sigh of relief.
Authenticity ? / I tried my best to stay as faithful as possible to the original designs, nothing is added or removed from the initial source material, but in pursuit of better quality using upscaling, the text on some designs became unreadable as it kind of just melted together. I tried to find a solution and work around it, but in the end it was a sacrifice i had to make due to the poor source material i had to work with. Some words are just jelly. Everything else has the original colors and nothing is artificially added or removed! My goal was to preserve the designs, not edit them.
So in the end... I decided to see through a passion project and preserve a tiny piece of Bulgarian history - old matchbox label designs, and im glad I did. Hopefully you find it as fascinating as i did to look through them all.
You can support me and get the project files* for $2,50 HERE
*(3D models, textures and HD versions of everything you see here)
*(3D models, textures and HD versions of everything you see here)
