What happens when a type designer-artist is let loose in a fabrication lab? With a laser cutter? Well, all kinds of crazy stuff gets created!
The Fab Lab in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Oh how many more hours I could spend there!
While I was in grad school, I worked on a project I called ‘experimental graphemes‘ that I modeled after Jessica Hische’s ‘daily drop cap’. Once a day I posted an elaborately drawn letter to this blog. Since I’m still obsessed with letters (I *am* a type designer, after all) I decided to digitize the letters and etch them to small pieces of wood, roughly the size of playing cards. And I decided to use Fontlab instead of Illustrator for the letters. Which may have been a little nuts, but hey…I learned some tricks and got better at using Fontlab in general!
It was so neat to watch the laser cutter do its thing. It etched the letters in a linear fashion, but none of us could figure out why it took the route it did in cutting the letters out…
Finished! My plan (in my free time) is to sand the letters and then color them with water colors. But there’s no telling when that will happen.
More Fab Lab Swag! In addition to the 26 letters etched on wood, I also etched 4 on plastic, made coasters, two ipad stands, a wooden box with a ‘living hinge’, etched two plaques and created a piece of art using recycled plexiglass circles. My friend’s comment at the end of the day was “with great planning comes lots of goodies”!
becca making faces 
Becca unleashed+ laser cutter= creative frenzy!
Boy, I’m so envy, that must have been quite a treat as an experience, they look amazing!
“I’m so envy”- Yikes, I accidentally saw this today at my dashboard!
Gods of the internet have mercy on me and allow me to redeem myself;
“I’m so envious”.
Haha, I just thought that you were so excited that you couldn’t help yourself. ;) I head back to the UK in a week…definitely going to see if I can find a fab lab close by! (I’ve heard that the one in Manchester is fantastic…but it’s 200 miles away and 3.5 hours by public transit. :( )
like like like like :) (And now I’m off back to work).
This work is beautiful and I’m happy I came across something like this, was thinking the same exact thing for my portfolio. If you don’t mind me asking, what method (technique) did you use to bind the pages together. Is it similar to Coptic
I’m not sure which you mean…there are no books in this post. Do you mean one of the other books I’ve posted that is sewn of single acrylic plastic pages? That technique is called ‘sewing single sheets’ and is found in Keith A Smith’s book of the same name.