As I said at the end of my last: School pride FTW! I wanted to kind of share the small business plan I have. I’m not as driven as a real entrepreneur, but it is kind of fun to play with the idea of being at least a part-timer! I’ve shared that in the past I used to make Crayon Art and for a little while I considered trying to monetize that hobby, but in the end it was much more work than what I felt comfortable charging people so I scrapped the whole thing. Initially when preordering my glowforge I had been working for a cellphone/tablet repair shop that also sold accessories, and so my manager and I at the time thought it would be cool to test out engraving cases, and possibly even phones! Unfortunately, as we all know, the original ship date was not exactly what it seemed, and fast forward a couple of years and we find ourselves in different places with different ideas. Too bad I don’t work there anymore, we got a lot of broken phones from an insurance company that would have been a blast (pun intended) to test the laser on!
Recently, after having made another portrait for a friend, as well as some keychains, I considered to actually making a side business out of my purchase. Sure, sure, I know that for some of us that was always the intention, but I had given up on that dream somewhere in the last couple of years, and now it’s becoming a reality again So I thought to myself, “If I’m going to make a business, then what should my logo be?” I’ve always been attracted to my name as a business - “Ray’s Burgers” “Ray’s Place” “Ray’s…” etc. It’s 2017 and it seems that minimalism is all the rage, so I opted to just go with “Ray.” I knew that I wanted to make unique gifts and that of course was what would be my product, and any good logo is associated with its products. This lead me to the conclusion that my signature was a good option - the idea came up while I was at work, and so I just did a signature real quick on a sticky note, which I then took home with me and decided to finally use the trace function. Wow. That was my initial reaction. I just could not believe how good the machine was at picking up the signature and being able to translate that into an engrave file. Huge, huge, HUGE shoutout to @Jules and the fantastic tutorials she has compiled, I followed her suggestions of building the contrast when using trace and it helped a ton. I did notice that it picked up micro dust specs/imperfections on the sticky note, and so if there are any suggestions on removing those that would be appreciated.
Continuing on…I figured that what I was wanting to do was have the laser engrave this signature onto business cards, that I would order, onto one side. On the opposite side I would have my contact information just printed from whomever I order the cards. My wife has a small little business selling lipstick and has business cards galore for me to practice on. I grabbed one, threw it into the forge’s mouth and printed the uploaded trace’d image.
I was so excited watching this print. Everytime I print something that is 100% my design, there’s just this huge sense of accomplishment and what was fun was that it didn’t take too long (bonus!). After it finished I began wondering how I could make it more unique. I was visualising how almost too plain the front of the business card would be with just that printed, and then another idea entered my mind. I recently watched a video of a man taking a picture of his thumbprint and (attempting) to laser it onto a skateboard deck. I decided I would also use my thumbprint to add another later if individualism to my cards. After stabbing a few down, I figured that it may not be the best idea to have out my signature AND my thumbprint all in one convenient place I grabbed a thumbprint off of Google images and began processing the design in Photoshop. Here’s the result on another card
Was my literal expression when seeing how it turned out. In fact, after printing it on the card, I had to try it on the medium clear acrylic…
I think that this is the final draft of the design and will be what I use, but I’d like to know what y’all think. It’s been fun designing this stuff and I’m excited for what the future will bring!
A question I wanted to ask was this: What filler would someone use for the card’s engraving? I want it to be darker, as the brown engrave isn’t my style, but I’m still in love with it either way. I want something that won’t bleed into the rest of the card and can easily be wiped off, but I may be asking too much
Lastly the cards I used were .015 thick, with settings 1000/15. The first print didn’t go as deep as the second, but this may be due to both me changing the LPI to 450, and because of the thumbprint in the background. Highly recommend playing with business cards/cardstock because the engrave is amazing! I can actually feel the ridges in the thumbprint and gives it amazing depth.