The Beginning
This project was a very fun and exciting one to execute. Although simple and easy, it still contained many open doors for my own creativity to flow into. One of the first doors that was there was located in the initial designing process of the key chain. At first, I was going to create a tree decal with brown bark, green leaves and red apples, but then I thought about where I would apply that once it was complete. I could not answer my own question. So I decided instead to make a decal that could serve as a gift to someone else. Eventually I came to the conclusion to create a decal for my friend. Being the ultra creative person that I am, I made my design based off of her nickname Fishy B. It would contain a blue circle background on top of which would be an orange fish, white waves and white letters spelling out the word "Fishy B.". I then virtually constructed it in Illustrator, an endeavor relatively easy for me at this point. I was ready to go down into the innovation center and cut out my decal!
My initial design idea was to create a tree. If I had continued with this idea I would have found clip-art images of a leaf and an apple and then individually copied and pasted each one onto a specified part on the tree shown above.
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Once I decided to do away with the tree idea, I moved onto the fish design. With a simple circle background, text, and only one picture to trace and create outlines for (although you also should create outlines for text), the overall design was easy to execute in Illustrator.
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This is a picture of my final design that I would later take down to be cut out. After some slight color changes (my desk neighbor was very helpful in her advice on color choices) I was confident in my design and excited to see how the final product would turn out.
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The Machine
Down in the innovation center, I found the vinyl cutter up against the window side wall. Beside it was an old computer whose Illustrator had not been updated yet. I had to use this particular computer because that was the only computer that was linked to the vinyl cutter, so to accommodate for the lack of updated software, I had previously saved my Illustrator decal design as a cs6. Due to my preparation, printing the design was very easy. I had to repeat the same process of pressing buttons on Illustrator as well as the actual vinyl cutter machine three times (one for each color: blue, orange and white), which did get tedious. One challenge however was picking out the colors to use because the orange was very bent and I thought I would not be able to use it, but Ms. Proctor came to my rescue and straightened it all out - literally. After the vinyl cutter cut them out and I cut off the extra material, my decals were finished - but not quite. The next step was to apply them. I used the same process as described before on my ILLUSTRATOR page, except I placed the fish, waves and words on the circle, and then just applied the circle onto a notebook. Overall, I'm very happy with my results, as is my friend who received the gift.
The Final Product
What I Learned.
This was my first station of the three rotations we do in IDEA. It was also my first time actually using the vinyl cutter. Previously I had used Illustrator to design my key chain and also to design my notebook cover, so although I did learn new things about Illustrator (Ex. getting rid of parts of a traced vector image) it was relatively easy to maneuver as I've now had experience with it. The vinyl cutter was a different story. I had to get lots of help from others, and because my friends think they are funny, they made me go first rather than themselves so that they could watch me struggle through the process before they did. Although I do admit that because I went first I was then more able to help others who went after me which did solidify my knowledge of the machine. Applying the decal was really nothing new either, but once again it was a good process for me to repeat. This project was a fun and rather relaxing one. It was great to learning the ins and outs of the vinyl cutter machine, and I hope that I will find ways in the future to make use of the knowledge I have obtained of it in this class.