Made this for my office today. The material is 1/8" Chemcast acrylic, but I just lie to my Glowforge and say it’s Proofgrade. Here’s to having a lot of scraps so when inspiration strikes, you have what you need!
This was pretty easy to make, an hour tops because I had the logo art … and had already figured out the magic numbers for press-fitting 1/8" acrylic parts: the shape that goes on the inside needs to be cut .008" bigger all the way around. This will produce parts that fit tightly enough that you don’t need glue.
I do the fattening with Object>Path>Offset Path in Illustrator, at default miter settings. That adds an outer path, so you have to delete the inner path. There is probably another way to do this, there always is. (There are also some gotchas to using this tool on complex pointy shapes but none of that applied here.)
Oh, your letter shapes can be Compound Paths, so you want to Release them and only fatten the outside of the shape. Leave the inner letter voids cut at the default size, and then cut fattened copies of the inner shapes out of the background color.
This project probably has my most favorable ratio of amazing looks to time spent so far. This is exactly the kind of thing I daydreamed about making after ordering my Pro.
