No matter how professionally constructed an electronic project is inside, others judge it by the exterior appearance. Hand drawn labels can look positively awful.

The good news is a computer enables anyone to create professional custom labels and dials in a short time. These techniques are excellent when restoring old radios too, as spare parts can be impossible to find.

Computer software helps

All that’s needed is a graphics application like Photoshop Elements. It’s priced at about $200 (or included with many digital cameras). Elements is considered by many to be the among the most versatile graphics and digital software, only surpassed by the full version of Photoshop (which sells for considerably more but is very much more powerful).

Copy or restoration projects will also need a scanner or a camera to copy originals. Scanners regularly sell for less than $100 these days (especially USB scanners); "good enough" digital cameras have also come down dramatically in price.

Existing designs can be copied, or custom projects created for printing on a home printer. You can also get true photographic prints at a photo lab; even have transparencies made or the design screen printed onto plastic, glass or metal.

You don’t have to be an artist if some lateral thinking is employed. For example, shapes like rectangles and curves can be drawn perfectly using the lasso tool or the rectangle or ellipse tool if appropriate, then filled with any colour. If you only need a portion of a curve, the rest can be cut away.

This guide is based on Photoshop 7 on a PC or Mac, however the techniques apply to any graphics application with layers.