Creating the Lightbox Sign

Originally I was going to make the light box out of MDF and then stick vinyl onto frosted acrylic to make the letters but after consulting with the 3D workshop and the creative lab, I ultimately decided to create the entire sign out of acrylic and laser cut it so that the sides precisely fit together. I subsequently drew a new plan for the sign.

After creating this plan, I took the Everyman logo that I had designed and traced over it in Adobe Illustrator to make it a vector rather than a pixel image.

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And then I created a box around it and inverted the black to see what it would look like when it got cut.

I then drew out the sides of the sign based upon the box I drew around the lettering, I created 'fingers' so that the sides could attach without the need for glue, and expanded the sides by 0.09mm so that they would fit together snugly. I also drew out the letters that would be cut out in white frosted acrylic that would fit into the gaps cut out of the face of the sign.

I then loaded the file into the laser cutter and let it cut.

After cutting, I popped out the letters and sides from the sheet of acrylic. This was done with some difficulty because the laser cutter had not been set to a powerful enough setting and I had to use a scalpel to nudge out some of the letters completely. Unfortunately during this process, some of the fragile spaces between the letters on the face of the sign cracked, but in the end I managed to put everything together. I covered some of the gaps that occurred as a result of the slotting method with black electrical tape so that light would not leak through when I added the LED strip lights at the end, I did the same with the cracks that had appeared during the assembling process. Once I put the LED strips into the back of the sign, the inside looked like this.

FMP: Week 4

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