1st project from scratch - a Simple Wooden Business Card Luggage Tag

Since I have been busy with work (and our relatively new house), I haven’t had a lot of time on the 'forge, but I have had a chance to make a few wooden luggage tags for friends, family, and myself.

Here’s a very simple one (mine) with a custom back-side engrave, that I need to re-do on a higher power/ slower pass. Really looking forward to being able to undertake some “real” projects, including dividers for sock drawers, a keyboard holder for my desk drawer (with storage spaces for typical desk contents), a decorative book holder (for letter cut books that don’t stay standing well because the open up and spread out), and then some real creative projects. :wink:

Anyway, here’s how nicely a standard business card turned into a luggage tag.

Front:

Back:

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Very nice! (And not a bad promo idea.) :grinning:

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Thanks @Jules! You must truly live on these forums - and are always so quick to respond, and are always so cheerful! Always good to see a post or reply from you.

To your point, turn about is fair play I guess…:slight_smile: @dan was kind enough to come speak at our Retail Forum event in Fall of 2016 - on the topic of innovation. (and of course, he was a huge hit!)

While we would have loved to have a working 'Forge at the conference, getting one from Seattle to Miami would have been difficult to say the least, and he Wowed the crowd with the video, his stories, and his personality.

Speaking of promotional ideas, one of the things we (the company I work for) sometimes do is to have a graphic artist attend some of our Design Thinking / Visioning sessions, writing up a visual representation of key outcomes from a meeting in graphical format.

I’m hoping I can find a recent one where we’ve produced something like that that I can scan in and create a nice engrave of it for one (or many) of our customers.

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:smile: True that! I work from home, it’s easy to keep a tab open to the forum (which is generally a lot more interesting than trying to come up with something to make sump pumps sound exciting.)

Look forward to seeing it. The most recent Glowforge project I put together for pure promotional purposes was a little collection of business card holders and a roll stamp dispenser, and I’d really prefer to try something that requires a bit less assembly…particularly since DH keeps changing his mind. (He wants a company logo rework now, which will mean a lot of revisions to the existing brochures.) The business card holders might have to wait.

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Bump the font size double (at least) for your name, and 30-50% for your title/position. Ditch the http:// in the URL, it’s not needed. Bold or bump the font size of your area of expertise.

I’d try and get a darker burn out of it if possible, or look into a post-process method of darkening the engraved areas.

And for what it’s worth as the design currently sits there’s a LOT of whitespace. That’s okay if you’re looking to keep it stark and simple but I think you could make a stronger impression with a few design tweaks.

I always like to poke around for design inspiration. If you’re so inclined.

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I appreciate the feedback. This was literally a copy of my corporate business card. The ones I made from scratch for my brother in law and my niece were more in line with those recommendations.

Yes, definitely too much white space, but that is how the corporate standards for the card came out. I think for more artistic cards, having a “clone you card to a wooden luggage tag” might be a way to either create promo item or a small revenue generating approach.

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Wow another GF owner in my area! Cool!

Huh, I thought that kind of copy just wrote itself. :thinking::rofl:

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This is such a good idea!

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Neat project and super useful! Now we can all hold you accountable to make your sock dividers. :slight_smile:

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Well, @dan the Sock Drawer Divider is done. Great use of Draftboard. (and the reason for my additional order of 20 pieces, on top of the earlier order placed yesterday for 10. )

I’m working on re-cutting an additional divifder for the right side… but having to search through scraps until the orders of new medium draftboard arrive… :wink:

Close Ups:
image2

Can I just say… Every day, I love the Glowforge even more.

But… when are you adding Proofgrade(™ Febreeze to the store?

(Maybe you could strike a deal with P&G for some coupons / sample shipments with every order of Acrilyic?) :wink:

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Love the dividers! (I need to do some too!) :grinning:

Jules, lef me know if you want me to upload the SVGs - obviously very basic, but if it saves a little bit of effort, I’m happy to share.

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Oh bless you, that would save me some time! I’m trying to get the office sorted out - and I’ve got stuff in here dating back to the last ice age. :smile:

Now you Must go buy more socks to fill that drawer! :slight_smile:

I left the socks out so it would photograph well. What you don’t see are the two (smaller, but deeper) drawers above this that are used for athletic socks (colors on the left, white on the right), or the box of additional socks in a downstairs closet.

T-shirt and other dividers will be designed later, but the socks had to be dealt with first. One of the best benefits is that Blue socks are on the left side and black / dark grey are now on the right.

And a learning to my fellow 'Forge designers, which you can see in some of the pictures - when making dividers like this, use a combination of lengths for the cross pieces - I ended up starting with some that are divided into two pieces (at 15 and 1/2+ inches each), and then added a variation that is split into three pieces. Its good because it provides an extra lavel / layer of stability across the rows, AND it lets you leverage scrap pieces as well.

Out of happenstance, I also discovered that I like having the cross pieces not as tall / deep as the Aisle dividers - and I have them positioned so they aren’t resting totally on the floor of the drawer. It provides a little bit of “flow” flexibility for socks to “eek” under a divider a bit on the bottom, but still maintain the integrity of the position overall.

I did briefly consider using clear acrylic, but until Dan puts out the proofgrade Febreeze, I think that would be a bit much…

I’ll post a zipped SVG file with 5 or 6 different variations that I used / experimented with in a minute - especially if it helps anyone else as a starting point. One of the things you will see is that in some of the later files, I started varying the colors slightly so that it would be easy to remove or move individual “panels” to easily fit them on draftboard remnants. (I REALLY wanted to finish this up, and while I have 30 pieces of medium draftboard on order, didn’t want to have to wait until they got here for this one project (drawer) to be finished.

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Here you go, @Jules! (and anyone else in this fantastic community). Six different files with various sizes / heights. I figured that having more to choose from would be better.

sock drawer parts.zip (12.9 KB)

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Fantastic! Thanks bunches! :grinning:

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No, I have that already well covered. :wink:

And there is still a good bit of laundry to be done…

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Huh, with 2 drawers of socks I thought you just tossed them after wearing. :slightly_smiling_face:

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