Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Laser Cut and Engraved Business Cards”.
I absolutely love maker faire, it’s one of my favorite places on the planet. I’M not just saying that, because i work for make in maker faire, i actually went to many before i was hired and absolutely loved it. It’S one of the reasons that i agreed to begin working for make and the other employees that make will probably tell you that maker faire is the highlight of their job now this year. I wanted to do something a little bit different from my next trip to maker faire. I’Ve recently got a laser cutter and i thought it would be fun to do custom, laser-cut business cards. I’Ve seen a few examples over the years.
I believe the first one i saw was from hive 13. many years ago and even our digital fabrication, editor matt stoltz laser cuts his own business cards before he comes to maker faire. So i thought it would be fun to do a tutorial to show how you would go about designing a business card for laser cutting. Now i wanted mine to be something a little bit special, here’s a regular business card. This is what i usually give out to people. It’S got my information. My email address the phone number you can reach me at, and it looks just like my co-workers, but here is the card that i’ve designed from maker faire you’ll notice that it’s got a perforated line and a cut so that i can pop it free fold it In half and it will stand up on its own, this video is going to serve as a bit of insight into how these things are designed.
I’Ll show you how i put it together in adobe, illustrator it’ll just take a few minutes and then we’ll engrave it and we’ll cut it in the laser. I start by creating a new file. That’S about the size of a business card in illustrator, then i bring in a high resolution version of our makey robot. Now my laser cutter could raster engrave an image, but i don’t want to do that. I want this all to be one single file so that it lines up perfectly. So what i’m going to do is i’m going to use image tracing to create a path from this image and there we have a path.
Now there are a few invisible elements. I have to delete, i don’t want these extra little, it did the white as well. So i delete that and get rid of it after i’ve got the makey in place. Then i start adding the text. I add my name here and our uh creative director and our graphics. People are gon na hate this, but i’m not using our official font, i’m just using whatever i had on the machine at the time.
So i create my name and i want it right about the middle of the card and you’ll see why here in a minute, i want the card to be able to fold in half basically, but with my name still showing, then i add my title: i’m doing All of this in black, because the color coding is going to make a difference, everything in black is going to be engraved and then the cuts will be a different color, we’ll get to that in a moment. So i’ve got my title added and now i’m throwing my email address in there. This card is intentionally simple.
It doesn’t have our address or fax number. I didn’t add my cell phone number, i’m keeping it simple. I like it simple.
I don’t really feel like all the rest of that stuff is needed. I’Ve never received a fax in my professional life. Okay, so here’s where i start drawing my cut lines.
I choose red because the laser is going to want red. I made a line and then i tell it to make it a dashed line. Now i adjust the spacing on the dash here so that the card can still be fairly rigid, even though it’s got all these holes cut in it.
Let’S zoom in here a little bit and look at it. We have a solid line. I go up here. I open up the dash menu and i put in the spacing, and you can see it – you can preview it there and i’m kind of playing with the space in between that would be too weak, there’s not enough space in between the red cuts.
So i kind of reversed that made them smaller and then put a bigger gap in between them and i’m happy with that. So then, i need to replicate that cut over off of makey’s other shoulder here and luckily illustrator prompts you to show you whenever you’re lined up horizontally or vertically with other things, it’s pretty smart program. You could probably also use a program like inkscape, which is free to do this, but i do have illustrator, so i’m trying to learn it and then i start drawing the cuts that are going to go up over makey’s head now. I don’t want this to be one solid cut. I actually want to leave a few tabs so that it doesn’t fold on its own in my pocket or wallet.
So i’m creating these lines manually up the sides here and you can see it takes a few tries to get it just right. Problem i was having here is that it was wanting to automatically join to the dotted line. I didn’t want this one to be dotted.
I want this one to be solid, so i was able to separate them enough that it saw it as a separate line and then just went and unchecked dashed. So here we’ve got the two cuts going up the shoulders, and now i want two more cuts across the top of the head, so i drew them out leaving gaps and, of course those gaps are where it’s not going to cut, and then i switched to the Other tool here and i just started kind of tweaking the individual points to get it as close as i felt comfortable, i’m zoomed in pretty far, and this doesn’t have to be accurate. I wanted a border, so i drew a border around it and i decided to make it with little bitty curved corners and then it’s done. Then we take it over to the machine and we run a test engrave which turned out beautifully and here’s my favorite part. I’M not going to speed this up at all. Just watch this in real time.
This is the cut. I love that it’s so cool, so once i’ve done that, then it’s just a matter of pumping out a ton of these and that takes a while. It takes about 40 minutes to do a whole sheet all right. I’Ve got a fat stack of business cards now and, hopefully i’ll see you at maker faire be sure to like and subscribe for more videos from make you .