Cut it out

I've been going through a bit of a creative dry spell recently. Photography isn't doing the trick. Graphic design felt forced and unnatural. And as for writing, well, the absence of a post here for days should speak for itself.

But sometimes inspiration can strike in the most unexpected of places and reasons. This time it struck when I was font shopping at Veer.com and while browsing the merch section stumbled across this scarf created from uppercase letters in Helvetica. Not sure how warm it would keep a neck, but at least it'd be the most literate neck around. The laser cut letterforms really made an impression on me. It's such a striking look, and one I thought might be fun to recreate and make into a project.

I had reason to send someone a thank you card and it seemed to me like a great opportunity to make the card rather than buy a commercial one. So after finding the right weight of Helvetica for the job, the layout began. And while it took longer to design the layout of the card than I'd like to admit, the actual production of the card was a bit trickier than I had expected. It's been many many years since I had to wield an x-acto blade for artwork and am woefully out of practice. All the straight lines were pretty easy, but that curvy "s" took as long as the rest of the card did. If I do this again, better paper will be needed as the paper I used didn't fold crisply, the grain of the paper was not working to my advantage. Plus it might be nice to have a laser cutter do the trimming…maybe Santa will bring me a table top laser cutting machine.

Overall I think the results are satisfactory. Not as clean and accurate as I would have liked, but I don't think the recipient will notice or even care. Which now makes me question why even do it. Well, at the very least the strike of creative inspiration, while not igniting a full-on fire, has started a smoldering that, hopefully, if fed the right fuel will turn into a burning passion again.