Here's a cool article from Modern Electronics Magazine 1985 for making labels and graphics for electronic equipment. I used to screen print in the 80's and I could get some good details but it wasn't easy without professional equipment. Now we can do the layout on a computer and print a transparency at home, not like back then where the game-changing MacIntosh helped make layouts easier and more cost efficient but not until the late 80s. 3M still sells their Scotchcal Graphic Film so this is still doable. I'd start with a strip and figure out the best exposure for the process and then have a lot of fun. https://archive.org/details/modern-electronics-september-1985/page/n25
Around the time this was published Letraset (and other manufacturers equivalents) was still really popular. In 1979 I bought some sheets (probably through ETI magazine) that had common words like Volume, Tone, Tape, and Phono pre-formed on the sheet.
Letraset was very popular but it was extremely hard to match some of the fonts or sizes if you were repairing a panel. I did a lot of work with screen-printing and offset printing and sometimes would play with the equipment when the boss was gone. We had Letraset and a Gestetner Label Machine to generate the wording, then, with a neat process you could make a transparancy (for screenprinting) or a black and white photo for offset printing. The Apple MacIntosh changed everything making all of these machines worthless, and at a fraction of the cost. You could generate your layout on the computer, print it out, and then have a printing plate made. It should be one of the greatest process shifts in history (like the assembly line) but most people didn't really see a change from their end, the newspaper still looked the same. The process above looks like it it's kind of back-wards from screen printing, your exposing your lettering and graphics which can also stick to a surface, for screen printing your removing your graphics so you basically have a stencil to print through.
