My talented friend Tiffany and I bartered: I would create a name plaque for her and she would make a gift baby quilt for another friend of mine. Custom sketch, digitized, and then laser etched onto birch plywood. I’m not 100% happy with how the staining turned out. It looks great from some angles, but from others the words completely disappear! Live and learn. Oh, and because I did it all in Fontlab, I gave her the font so she can use ‘Tiffany Anne’ as a signature or tag on other projects. Fun!
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”!
Detail of a plaque displaying C.S. Lewis’ poem “What the Bird Said Early in the Year” along Addison’s Walk in Magdalen College, Oxford
becca making faces 