Friday, September 23, 2011

tender buttons process


because my type compositions were set fairly early on, i had plenty of time to experiment with my cover imagery. my first try looked a little something like this:
 

but kidwell encouraged me to try to incorporate some imagery in addition to the ornament i had been making, so these were some of my attempts:








all of this, it seemed, was a little too much. too heavyhanded. we had a lot of talks about how to reference the victorian music box experience without trying so hard to recreate it, that delicate line it's necessary to walk to be a contemporary designer alluding to old things. ultimately, i reigned my cover way, way back to a single piece of ornament in the center, particularly because my box's shape is going to be ornamental enough. which leads me to:



the amazing router/plotter machine that allowed me to assemble my box! all i had to do was compose in vector form the shapes i needed cut, and decide how, exactly, the cuts/levels that belong in each of the shapes.

my vector layout looked like this:


 i took this file into the woodshop and john riley opened it in the router's program. we spent probably an hour going through each shape and telling the machine the depths and kinds of cuts it needed to make. once we finally started, we still had to stop and revise the toolpath probably a half-dozen times before we finally got it right. only lost one piece due to user error! (that's why i had the pieces to build two double-high boxes: just. in. case.)

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