Tag Archives: plastic

a fontified version of The Princess Bride

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I’ve been playing with lasers again! These designs were created as prizes for my office. We’re a bunch of nerdy geeks who create fonts for publishing minority languages. Last year we started taking bits from the ‘team movie’ of The Princess Bride and twisting them to our own silliness. There were actually a few more converted quotes, but these were the ones I chose to design. I etched them on wood as well as several different types of acrylic, but I feel that these turned out the best. Pardon the bits of dust clinging to them! I rubbed silver paint into the etching, exactly like I did for the Obscure Word book.

F.O.U.S.s…Fonts Of Unusual Size!FOUS(R.O.U.S.s…Rodents Of Unusual Size)

The Glyphs of Insanityglyphs of insanity(The Cliffs of Insanity)

Twoo Typetwoo typeTwoo Wuv

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quote book

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This was a birthday gift for a huge fan of the radio show/book/movie Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There is one quote per each of the eight pages, arranged so that when the book is closed the words form a ‘word cloud’. The pages are laser-cut and etched acrylic plastic and are sewn with waxed linen thread using the same method as in my previously posted book. I wanted to create a gradient of sorts using paint in the etched letters, fading from white to black. It mostly worked the way I wanted it to.

Let me just say, photographing this thing was a nightmare. First, smudges! Ack! And then the waxed thread left marks all over the surfaces. Plus having to dodge the reflection made taking pictures super fun. Not. Anyway, I really like the possibilities of laser-etched acrylic…but if I ever do clear again, I will be using non-waxed thread for sure, and waiting to peel the backing off until the very last minute! (Scratches seemed to come out of nowhere.)

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Fab Lab Fun

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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!
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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!

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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…etched letters-2

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.etched letters-3

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”!
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