Illustrator
Illustrator is a program by Adobe that allows you to create 2D pictures and models that can be used for engraving or printing. It also allows you to create either vector or raster images, and to be able to alternate between them. You can also use images from google, but they will only be recognized by the laser if they are black and white.
teamliquid Key chain.
This project we used a program called Illustrator to make our own personal key chain that we can do what we please with. Here are the steps that I took to create my key chain.
Step 3: Granted, this image may be hard to see, but it's meant to be like that. Once I made the outline, I had to change the color of the lines to red and to change the thickness of the line to 0.0001 pt. It makes the line very skinny and faded. Also, the laser "speaks" in RGB, and the red color means to cut.
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Step 4: In step 4, I imported my "teamliquid" into Illustrator and I cropped it to make sure that It fit into the template. I also had to change many settings as well as make the image a vector image, and not a raster image. A little side note, this images colors were originally inverted, so I used MS Paint to invert it so that there was more white than black in the image.
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Step 6: For this step, I changed the font to my liking and I had to make sure that I changed the text to be a vector image so that the laser would engrave the words and image out correctly. I also had to try my best to keep the words center aligned which was difficult since I had to eyeball it, but it doesn't seem like I did a bad job at guessing. Time for the laser!
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Vinyl Name Cutout.
Step 2: Mrs. Proctor set up the vinyl cutter so that all of the names that we printed onto the document would be cut out from there. After we got our names from the vinyl cutter, we had to use a piece of transfer tape to get our letters from the vinyl sheet to our notebook.
Step 3: Finally, we transferred our names to our notebook.
Conclusion
After doing both of these projects, I realized how fun using machines and technology to make something that you customized yourself is. It also taught me how to use the laser and the vinyl cutter, which I will later be needing to know because of rotations. Overall these two projects were a huge success and I would love to do this again sometime. I'd recommend this because you get to see one of your digitally-custom creations be made into reality like my key chain was.