InPress:: Lasercutting

We attended a lasercutting slot we had booked for 9am this morning. We went with a pile of wood and out vectored image in illustrator, however, when we got down there we found some 3mm acrylic which we thought would work better if we were going to wet our stock before embossing.

Neither of us we entirely sure how to go about setting up the laser cutter, as it was our first time using it, so we stuck to the guide and worked through the points.

We managed to correctly set up the machine and cut 3 sizes of our 'inpress design' logo. However, when we picked up the acrylic many of the counter and letters fell out and through the grating. Also, the lettering seemed a little too small to manage and effectively be able to emboss with. So, we set up the machine again and cut our logo at a slightly bigger size this time. Much better.

We took this back to the studio, armed ourselves with some super glue and stuck the letters to another piece of acrylic (back to front, so that when we embossed the type would be the correct way round) whilst also sticking a fair bit to our fingers!!!

The type had dried and set onto the acrylic so we cut mountboard into rough business card sizes and went to the print room to uses the presses in order to emboss.

Firstly, we tried wetting the front of the mount baord, in order to give a better impression and put it in the press. However, this was a mistake! When we removed the card from the press, some of the paper stuck to the face of the lettering and also removed a few from the acrylic base. Not good.

So we tried with no water, put it in the press and the result was very effective.

We then got talking and decided there must be a way to create the effect of what we had created by simply using the laser cutter and not having to faff around gluing! As a result, we went back down to the laser cutting room to ask about this. We spoke to a man who said that if we created a jpeg black and white image (with the type in white and background black) then rasterized this on the laser cutter it should work. It wouldn't be as thick as what we had already created, but it would create a worthy impression into our stock.

Straight away, we booked a slot, sorted the artwork and got back down there. It was a little trickier to set-up than previously so we got the lovely man to help us.

The effect was very good and Niall and I were very pleased with the outcome.

We took our stamp back to the print room again to print, put it in the press and this came out....

OOPS!
We hadn't reversed the type when we cut it so the was the wrong way round. Nevermind. It was a learning curve and we had learnt from this mistake. It was too late to do another one this afternoon, but we have booked a slot and are going to rectify this problem tomorrow.