It’s probably a little strange to save this for the second week, but things just worked out that way!

The earliest version of the logo

At some point during the technical setup for 52 Lasers, I decided that I’d have to put together a logo of some kind; leaving the site’s name as a tiny text field just wasn’t going to fly. I settled on a condensed House Gothic  fairly early on for its simple, tall letters. In tried-and-true quick logo fashion, I knocked out the second word and called it a day.

The characters before the transfer tape was removed

Once I realized that I wanted to cut a physical version of the logo for photography, I made some alterations to the letter forms to keep the R and A counters from being troublesome, and cut the whole thing out of 1/4″ thick transparent acrylic. As an added measure, I cut an additional rectangle around the outside of the piece, knocking out the knock out and making a nice template for aligning the loose acrylic pieces.

In addition to the photography accompanying this post, I shot several new photos to use as headers. All of the headers are brand new, and I wholly expect to make several more as time goes on. With the template made, I can introduce the logo to strange new worlds and snap some shots while I’m at it!

This shot is reflecting our laser’s blue chassis

I think the best thing about this acrylic is how higher PPI settings will melt the edge as the laser passes, creating the mostly smooth (and entirely unburnt) sides of each character. PPI, or Pulses Per Inch, tell the laser how many times it should fire for each lateral inch it travels. Low settings like 150 can result in a perforated look—this can be used to functionally perforate thinner materials. Higher settings, like the maximum of 1,000 used in this project, overlap a lot of the heat. You can see this effect in most of the included photography and even some of the new headers.

A jumble of characters