Can you get any nerdier than creating custom floppy disk labels? There was a geek hierarchy meme that went around the internet many years ago. It ranked groups of geeks by who “considers themselves less geeky than…” I’m pretty sure floppy disk label making would rank close to the bottom of that list. But I think it’s pretty cool.

A few months ago I picked up this floppy display piece at VCFSW. It’s obviously the guts of some 3.5″ floppy organizer, but I saw it and thought, man, this would look really cool sitting on a shelf with some disks in it. So I started looking into what it would take to print my own labels.

I started studying DOS game floppies and realized how incredibly plain most OEM disks actually looked. There’s some beauty in the vintage appearance of certain releases, but honestly, most games shipped on mass-produced white labels. So instead of reproducing them, I decided to “remaster” the labels. Keep the era, bring some modern looks.

If you ask me which DOS game from the 3.5″ floppy era I’d jump into and play today? Hands down, Warcraft. So that’s where I started.

For the labels themselves, Avery 94236 in glossy finish turned out to be the winner. Perfect size for the face plate, and the right corner radius.

One catch nobody tells you about: you need generic disks. Consumer floppies from a “box of floppies” almost always have 3M or TDK branding right on the metal door, and that ruins the retail look. Commercial software shipped on unbranded bulk media, so finding clean generic disks is half the battle.