To celebrate the holidays, NK Labs hosted a holiday cookie bake-off. Most of our team contributed cookies, and everyone got to try each treat then vote on their favorites in each of these categories: Most Creative, Best Decoration, and Overall Champion. The winner in each category received a small prize and a laser-cut ornament to celebrate their win. In this post, I'll be showing you some of the creative and technical process of creating the ornament design!
The inspiration for creating the ornaments was actually from OMAX, the company we bought our metal-cutting water jet from. Each year, they release a selection of holiday ornament DXF files that can be easily cut using their machines (see an example of their designs here). My original plan was to create a water jet “medal” for each of the winners, but I instead created a design to be cut on plywood using our Full Spectrum Laser CO2 laser cutter since it has the capability to engrave raster images on materials. Our laser cutter serves as a great tool for quickly making 2-dimensional parts. It is in our main office space, so we have easy access to it when we want to make prototypes out of wood, cardboard, or acrylic!
When I design a graphic, I usually like to start off by sketching out ideas on paper since I find it much easier than jotting down ideas digitally. Out of my sketches, I decided on a snow globe design with the NK Labs logo in the center and the award title written on the base. With my concept decided, I switched to working on the design using vectors in Illustrator. I chose to use Adobe Illustrator to make the designs since I find it to be less finicky than some other vector-based software, and I am most accustomed to using it.
My approach to creating graphics in Illustrator is to keep a copy of each phase of my design as I work on my document. Everything I make gets copied and put to the side so that when I start to merge files, I don’t lose the ability to go back and edit my vectors without undoing a bunch of work. This was especially important since I had varying text between designs; if I had merged the text to the snow globe and lost my original text box, I would have had to redo my formatting for the text when I went back to make the other two awards.
When I had all my elements, I used Outline View (Ctrl+Y) to check my work for overlapping or invisible vectors. Once I had done this, I copied everything to a new layer and started using the path finder tools to merge everything properly. The laser cutter will cut or engrave wherever there is a vector, so after merging my shapes, I went back into Outline View to make sure there were no un-needed vectors. I then went back and created new files for the additional awards needed.
The awards were then engraved and cut out on the laser cutter. It took a bit of tuning to get the engraving dark enough, but each engraved cut on the laser cutter took around 5 minutes, so each round of tests was not very long. Later in the day, the ornaments were awarded to contestants! The cookie event ended up being a fun way for our employees to showcase some of what they do outside of work and celebrate the holidays, and I enjoyed being able to contribute to that with these ornaments.
NK Labs, LLC is a product development engineering firm in Cambridge, MA. We have broad experience in the design of consumer electronics, robotics, and other innovative products. Please consider us for your next engineering design project!
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