Typographic Character Coasters

Wednesday, November 18 2009 @ 01:35 AM PST

A simple design project for font lovers: Single-character typographic coasters.

We started this project looking at some of the interesting variations amongst common fonts. Blowing them up to this size lets you start to see those differences more clearly than usual. Cutting them out as tangible forms takes it a step further-- you can feel the curves.

Also, they make pretty good coasters.

The coasters above were laser cut from 1/8" thick cork. The fonts represented include Times New Roman, Gill Sans, Courier New Bold, Futura Bold Italic, and Miso. We picked characters that seemed appropriate for making into single-piece coasters, and scaled them to size, assuming a 3" diameter glass could be placed on top. For the caret, that meant a larger font size than for the octothorpe.

The 1/8" cork sheets are from McMaster-Carr (9487K3), and are relatively inexpensive. They cut well with a hobby knife if you have a steady hand.

As we've mentioned before, these days it is straightforward to get parts laser cut for you. Local laser cutting shops are becoming more common and online services like Ponoko and Pololu make it easy to run small projects like these.

Here's a larger set fabbed out of 6 mm hardwood plywood.

Besides plywood and cork, we also made coasters out of medium-density fiberboard (MDF). Both MDF and plywood are susceptible to moisture damage (an operational hazard for coasters!) so we sprayed them with a clear acrylic coating to make them water resistant.

Here are the coasters cut from 6 mm MDF. Interestingly, this material darkened considerably from its "natural" color once we added the clear coat. Some chemistry going on here... not sure what.

Another set, laser cut out of 3 mm white acrylic.

Mmmmmmm.... Curvy.

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Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/typocoasters