The hole is the part doing the talking

A ring of twelve months, JAN through DEC, printed round the rim of a circle. One of them — AUG — is punched clean through, a hole where a word used to be.

Everything else on the disc is printed. That one month is removed.

Why remove a month instead of just printing the expiry?

Because a hole reads from further away, in worse light, than ink does.

A punched-out segment is legible through a dirty windscreen, at a glance, from outside the car, which is exactly the condition this document is meant to be checked under. A printed date needs close reading and good light; a gap in an otherwise complete ring is obvious at a distance because the shape of the whole thing has visibly changed.

Why does punching a hole matter for stopping forgery?

Because you can't add ink to something that was never printed there.

Ink can be faded, redrawn or covered convincingly. A hole in card can't be filled back in without leaving a visible patch, and it can't be moved to a different month without the tear showing. The disc communicates by subtraction rather than addition — what it tells you is the piece that's missing, not the piece that's there — and subtraction is much harder to fake than addition.

Why doesn't this design name a real licensing authority?

Because a licence disc isn't a decoration — it's a statement, made by an authority, that a specific vehicle is currently licensed to be on the road. That's a different category from everything else in this collection. A clearance, a wire colour, a gear ratio belong to nobody, and reproducing them plainly is fine. A licence disc's wording, its layout and its emblem exist to be recognised as a government's own mark, and putting a real one's identity on a shirt isn't a question of permission — it's a false claim made on that authority's behalf. Every mark on this design is invented, and no issuing body is named or implied anywhere on it. That isn't a softened version of the real thing; it's a different object that happens to share the same shape.

What's the invented registration doing at the centre?

Tying the disc to one specific vehicle rather than to vehicles in general.

VRN 8K21 sits at the centre with EXPIRES 31 AUG beneath it — a made-up mark for a made-up car, there so the disc reads as a record of one particular thing rather than as a generic symbol. That's the same logic as a chassis number struck one character at a time: specificity is what turns an object into a document rather than an illustration.

Does the punched month actually match the expiry date?

Yes, and that alignment is the whole design of the object — AUG is punched because EXPIRES 31 AUG is what's printed at the centre. A disc where those two didn't agree wouldn't be readable as anything, which is worth getting right even on an invented one.

Does this only work for cars?

Any licence renewed on a calendar and displayed for a stranger to check works the same way — a trailer, a boat, a dog, a market stall pitch. The common thread isn't the vehicle, it's a document meant to be checked at a glance by somebody who has no other way of knowing.

How is this different from an MOT advisory sheet?

They record different things about the same car. An advisory list is a statement about condition — what's wearing, what to watch. A licence disc is a statement about permission — whether the vehicle is currently allowed on the road at all. One's a diagnosis, the other's a licence, and a glovebox usually holds both.

Does it print well?

Yes — the ring of month names and the punched segment are both flat, hard-edged shapes.

Bone or cream for the ground keeps it close to card rather than metal, with black for the printed ring and red or green picking out the invented registration at the centre. The punched segment should read as genuinely absent — an edge with texture, not a shape simply left uncoloured — because the gap is the entire point of the object.

How do I get one made?

Describe the disc at JustOG — the months, the registration, and which one gets punched. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Eleven months printed, one month missing, and the missing one is the only one that matters today.