Candyspotting

Freshly Cut - Little Floridas for cevd

Cut from Arturo in Grey

Christine’s studio cevd designs beautiful custom invitations.

These little Florida cut-outs will become part of an invite.

The cotton Arturo paper was a dream to cut. There was virtually no odor or surface discoloration from the heat of the beam.

I’ve recently added a set of cotton and bamboo papers from Legion to my swatch catalog. Let me know if you’d like to see a sample.

More photos are on flickr.

Determining what to bridge

Here are three quick ways to determine what portions of your design need bridging.

In Illustrator:

1. Select All
2. Object -> Compound Path -> Release

This converts all of the closed paths of your design into their own objects. Now we can clearly see which pieces will be left on the laser bed, like so:

In Acorn, Photoshop etc:

1. Eyedropper the color from your image
2. Flood fill the background

All of the white portions need bridges.

To see what will actually be cut out, as with the Illustrator version:

1. Use the magic wand to select the background
2. Select -> Inverse (note: menu items may differ in Photoshop)
3. Edit -> Fill
4. Clear the selection

Common bridge problems

One of the critical pieces of making a design work in the physical work is paying attention to bridges — paths that cross gaps in your design to hold it together. A potential client is working on a gatefold envelopment for an invitation. She’d like to have some text cut out of the gatefold; that is, the text is negative space. We start our design by just typing in the text:

Without any changes, we’d end up with something like this:

Now it’s obvious that some bridges need to be added to the design. We’ll start by adding bridges (or rather, removing part of the design) to connect every island, like so:

Now the design looks like we intended when cut:

However, there is still a problem. Imagine taking your finger and pushing on different parts of the cut piece, for example, the middle of the “o”. This piece is quite floppy, making it likely to shift around, get pushed in and out and ultimately tear off. We could make the bridges really wide, but we risk throwing off the balance of the design or ruin the legibility. To reinforce the islands, we instead add more bridges:

Finally we have a design that looks good and is structurally sound:

I am of course happy to take your money in exchange for doing this work for you. I’ll make the needed changes, cut a physical prototype, photograph it for your approval, and send back the modified file.

Freshly Cut - Amanda & Nate’s Wedding Invitations

Cut from Paper Source in White and Stardream in Rose Quartz with coordinating 5 3/4” square envelope. Ink-free etched text.

My brother-in-law Nate was recently married to his high school sweetheart Amanda and I was delighted to design their wedding invitations.

A vinyl aficionado, Nate brought up the idea of making a mock-record invitation. I photographed and emailed several choices of paper to match their pink and white theme and they went with my favorite, a pearlescent rose. Spending some time on record sleeve production websites I came up with a good template that just required two strips of adhesive.

Perfecting the etching took the longest amount of time. I ultimately developed a technique that first etches the text, then finely outlines it to increase the contrast.

Heartfelt congratulations to the newlyweds. It was a joyous wedding with many sweet details.

If I made this invitation again I would make a few improvements. First, I’d change the font for the date. Perhaps adding bridges to the font used for the monogram would be enough. Second, I’d reverse-cut the sleeve so that the slight yellowing of the paper around the cuts would be on the inside instead of the outside. When I first did the cut it looked great; it wasn’t until a week or so later that the discoloration showed. Last, the white paper etched great (I tested at least eight whites from several mills) but it didn’t feel quite solid enough. It was somewhere in the 80-100# range; 120-140# would be much more record-like.

More photos are on flickr. This design is available to be customized for your special event from $5 an invite. I’m happy to work with your design or a third party designer as well, just email for more information or a quote.

Freshly Cut - Business cards for Mod My LLC

Cut from Mohawk Beckett Cambric in Blazer Blue/White. Stitch-effect edge and rounded corners.

ModMyi is an Apple news site with community forums and downloads. Kyle contacted me about creating cards to bring to the upcoming Apple developer conference in San Francisco.

Using a vector file of their logo I created five design choices and tested a couple of duplex blue papers. The thicker 130lb paper with its delicate linen texture was a clear winner. Why duplex? For my own cards I’ve used a wide range of papers. I found that the dark papers were frustrating because I had nowhere to write. With a dark/light duplex the problem is solved by having the back of the card to write on.

After a lot of testing I found the precise setting so that the laser would burn away just the blue layer of the paper, leaving the white to give high contrast for the text. Unfortunately this paper is relatively smokey; I had to clean the lens of the laser between each sheet to maintain the optimal power.

The duplex engraving isn’t as legible as printed text but it’s a very unique look. Additionally, there are no plates to make, no ink to use, and no nasty chemicals to clean up the ink.

To complete the project I designed a custom box to match the cards. (I’m eyeing a copy of The Packaging and Design Templates Sourcebook to make this process faster.)

Additional photos are over in my flickr photostream. You too can own a swanky set of laser-cut business cards if you just email to get the ball rolling.

Kerf widths, inside cuts and Illustrator

Cutting art with fine details requires accounting for the kerf of the laser beam. The laser beam’s center follows the center of the vector path. Some material will be burned away; the width of the removed material is called the kerf.

The kerf depends on a few factors, including the size of the lens, the type of the material, and the speed of the cut. For example, when cutting cardstock with a 1.5” lens a ULS 4.60 there is a 0.003” kerf on straight cuts and a 0.007” kerf on round cuts. Since the beam is centered, we only need to account for half of the kerf. In practice I’ve found that a 0.003” addition to the art allows for a good approximation of the original art.

Normally in Illustrator CS4 I use the appearance palette to add a Path->Offset Path… to account for the kerf. However, this doesn’t work correctly with inside cuts.

Candyspotting specializes in laser-cut paper. Contact me for a free estimate.

Inspiration - Chris Natrop

I’ve followed LA artist Chris Natrop for a couple of years. He makes stunning 3d installations often featuring cut paper.

Below is an image from his 2007 Pulse New York booth. Gorgeous! I’d love to see his pieces in person.

I’m lucky to have a friend who’s incredibly passionate about energy consumption. It makes me think about how my business and my family can reduce our draw. Since we have a baby in cloth diapers we start out pretty poorly — the washer, dryer, and dishwasher are run every day. We’ve made three recent changes to help our impact.

1. Replace the thermostat with an ecobee. I love our programmable thermostat. It makes it dead simple to keep the heat off or low when we don’t need it. Best of all, there’s an iPhone application so that when we’re out of the house we can remotely turn off the heat. It feels like the future when I can check the temperature of the house when I’m not inside it.

2. Go car-free. We were living “car light” for several years; we both used alternate forms of transportation to get to work. Portland’s public transportation is generally good and there are three Zipcars in walking distance from our house. We decided to sell the car and budget the money we would be spending on insurance for car rentals. Three months later, our son is much happier on the bus than strapped in his car seat, we don’t have the hassles of car ownership, and we get more fresh air! We’ve also successfully used Zipcar for a middle-of-the-night urgent care visit.

3. Sign up for energy offsets. Portland’s energy company, PGE, has a great program where you pay a bit extra to have your electricity offset with renewable energy. I like this program since it’s clear where the money is going. Most of the renewable source comes from wind. Who doesn’t love that? My laser was the motivator for signing up for this program. It doesn’t consume a huge amount of power, but it’s enough to make me conscious of it. I did some tests with a Kill A Watt with these results:

ULS 4.60 50W laser cutter

17W plugged in (“vampire” cost). The laser has a dedicated power outlet controlled by a switch, so I try to remember to turn it off.

86W turned on but not running

115W - 880W running - since it’s unusual for me to cut anything other than paper my actual usage is at the bottom of this scale. The few times I’ve cut acrylic or thick matboard I’ve had to crank up the power.

Quatro SPH-426 exhaust

107W - 128W. Again, this is normally at the lower end of the scale since I don’t need to run the exhaust at 100% when I’m just cutting paper. Since the exhaust is partway across the room I always turn it on and off via the dedicated wall switch, so I didn’t measure the vampire draw.

Up next? Insulating the garage and having a “blow test” done on the house.