Personal Logo

digital and physical explorations

Stanford University, ME102: Introduction to Product Realization, 1 week project

Challenge

Create a personal logo that is representative of myself, and make a digital and physical piece out of it.

Ideation

To begin, I brainstormed a full page of potential logo ideas. After a day of ideating, I came up with the idea of creating a logo out of my own hand. If I look at my left hand, it creates the shape of J and W, which are my initials. I thought this was really interesting to build off of, because to me using my hands is an important part of my life. Whether it be building, drawing, or rock climbing, I love being hands-on. And an added bonus: I’m left handed.

Rapid Prototyping

To get a general idea of what the logo would look like as a physical piece, I created two different prototypes out of different materials. I very much enjoyed the texture and shape of the wooden piece, but I like the layered idea from the foam core version.

Digital Drawings

After making the rapid prototypes, I decided to flesh out the idea in Illustrator. I started by tracing my hand, and from there I made many variations on the letters. I finally settled on thinner letters with a more rounded look (see bottom right).

Final Concepts

With my digital design finalized, I had to go through and decide on a physical piece. I decided to combine the wooden texture with the layers in my two prototypes and create a laser cut wooden coaster with an engraved hand, topped by a clear acrylic sheet with my initials rostered onto it. to keep the acrylic in place, I decided to made a wooden top rim and layer the acrylic piece between the base and top pieces of wood, with a wooden outer piece so I could easily glue the layers together. I also added tabs to ensure that the acrylic wouldn’t spin.

Creation

With the Illustrator files made, I cut all of the pieces on the laser cutter and glued them together.

Final Product