A few weeks back I wrote up my experience in using Inkscape with my kids to design a piece of jewellery with Ponoko. Now I can show you the results. They actually arrived pretty quickly but I’ve been messing around since then trying to work out what to use for the chain. We ended up going with the thin black leather, thought it gave the kind of “tough” look the boys wanted. Needless to say they were very happy with the results. They’ve already given some away to their friends and are quite keen for me to “make them some more Lego”. It’s definitely a case of “what have you done for me lately?” in my house.
I’ve added the .eps files to my new Ponoko showroom so if you want to get these made for you or your kids you can download them and have Ponoko cut them out for you. These aren’t for sale though. I’m not sure on what the copyright situation is with something like this. I think you’re pretty safe if you just make it for yourself and don’t try to sell them. At least it seems so according to the comments on this Instructable.
One word of warning. Inkscape doesn’t open .eps files. So if you’d like to customize the design yourself you’ll need the .svg file. And you can download that right here!
1. He doesn’t do anything at all to remember you on Valentine’s Day
2. He makes an excuse like, “I was too busy at work to get anything”.
3. He buys you chocolates or flowers but doesn’t even write anything in the card.
4. He expects you to have arranged a romantic evening.
5. He thinks you’re going to “make his night” just because its Valentine’s Day, even though he’s done nothing.
Or this post could be called, “How to Show Your Lady You Are A Superstar This Valentine’s Day”. You see Valentine’s Day is tough. In order to show you love the lady in your life you are supposed to give something thoughtful. And let’s face it chocolates and flowers don’t cut it. In fact if you don’t go “thoughtful” then you have to go expensive to impress, either an expensive restaurant or a piece of jewellery. And that quite frankly gentlemen, that just don’t fit your budget.
But don’t worry! There is a way you can really do something completely out of this world this Valentine’s Day. Something that will get you the big smiles and twinkle in her eye that we know you’re looking for. And ladies, it’s not a boys only thing. If you think that men don’t appreciate you doing something unique for them then you haven’t tried hard enough yet.
Check out the pieces of jewellery below from Dan Emery. Dan created these using Vecteezy, a free image index, and then had the Ponoko laser cutter cut the shapes for him. The neat thing about them is they take almost ZERO design skills. All you do is choose an image you like, draw the jewellery shape you want around the image, choose your material, upload your file to Ponoko and presto! You can even add those special words that you know will make her Valentine’s day, and every day she wears it - without killing your credit card or looking cheap.
Of course, the key to this is that when you give your Valentine’s gift you look into his/her eyes and say: “this was created by me, for you, it’s unique, and nothing else like it exists anywhere in the world - just like you”. Valentine’s Day is officially one of the only times you can get away with a line like this.
So, what’s the next step? Go sign up for Ponoko here, have a look at the Starter Guide and our other resources and get designing. There is still time to get it done if you hustle, you need to give us at least a week to get the end result to you. If you are having any problems, check out our Forums or leave a comment on the blog and we’ll help you out.
Ponoko is looking for an interaction designer who is passionate about creating a world-class user experience. As a key player of the team, you are passionate about understanding our users, developing creative solutions to meet their needs, whilst also satisfying business and brand requirements. You will participate in a user-centered design process to ensure that our online product is easy to use and meets the goals of the users and the business. You’ll be responsible for planning project strategies, creating sitemaps, wire frames and navigational structures, performing user testing, and ensuring the final product meets usability best practices. You are an experienced design leader working within project teams and comfortable engaging with a wide range of people.
If you’re interested please email your CV to david@ponoko.com
I think this is one of the coolest pieces of jewellery I’ve seen a long time. The design and style genius of Trevor Coghill of Contexture Design came up with it. Not only is it beautiful but it’s functional as well since it acts as either a bracelet or “java jacket”. If you’re a coffee nut who’s buying take out coffee everyday you might want one as a cool environmentally friendly accessory rather than as a bracelet. You can be happy that not only are you saving paper, but that the Coffee Cuff is made from recycled cabinetry veneers. If you’re interested in learning more about Contexture Design you can read this article about the Recycling Wizards here. And it looks like you can still pick up your bracelet from their website.
I have kids and therefore toys are a huge part of my life, so I couldn’t help posting about this toy - Q-BA-MAZE. My boys love playing with Lego, whether it be making their own creations or making stories from the different kinds they have (they have a mix of Castle Lego and Bionicles that keeps them entertained for hours). Q-BA-MAZE looks really fun as well. It’s building blocks but with a twist - that fun cascading aspect of Mousetrap, where you get the ball rolling from the top to the bottom in every which way. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s had a go at this to see what they thought of it. My thought is that you could get pretty addicted to building higher and more complex mazes with it.
Here at Ponoko we know that there are SO many of you who are really excited about designing your own products. But there are some hurdles to get over, and the first that usually stumps people is actually getting your design into a form that can be made into something real. For those of you with design skills and experience using Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw it’s not such an issue. But for all you newbies the team here at Ponoko are studiously working on more How-To’s to help you expand your creativity.
One tool we are going to put a lot of focus on is Inkscape since it has some neat features for you new Designers that I know you’ll like. I know I do. The most obvious are:
B: It runs on Mac OSX and Windows. In fact I run it on both and it seems to be identical even.
and C: It’s FREE.
In my opinion, software is created to do something for me. Whether it’s sending an email or creating beautiful and unique jewellery NOT take hours of my time before I can even get a result from it. So normally when I get a new software package to use, I try to just do what I want rather than completely read the manual. While I’m sure that’s a bit frustrating for software developers who are probably shouting, “Read THE MANUAL Steven!!!” at their screens right now, I think a lot of people do this.
So if you are that way inclined and would like to get a quick win with Inkscape my very first suggestion is that you try tracing an image using the video at the bottom of this post. It is included in the Instructable that Dan and John created. Using the videos, the Making Guide in the Inkscape Starter Kit, and a lot of playing around my son and I were able to design our first piece of jewellery on Ponoko earlier this week. It took us quite a bit of time to get the image where we wanted it (mostly because of my lack of experience with Inkscape) and to then get it into the .eps version for Ponoko, but we did get there eventually. And it was very satisfying when we finally uploaded the completed .eps file to MyPonoko - a bit like having our first baby.
Here are some simple points that we came up with during the process that I think might make it easer for you to get the results you want without spending the same amount of time that I did. (Thank goodness for school holidays).
1. Choose a simple image! It can be tempting to want to trace something complicated but it can be depressing if it takes too long to get a first result. Especially if working with kids. Following the video below will really help. Please note the video pauses after about 10 seconds you just need to press play again to get it started. I find it’s easier just dragging the video slider to the point I’m working on so I can focus on that point in the process.
2. In the Ponoko starter kit it mentions that you MUST have your lines a certain color and stroke width so that the laser cutter knows to Cut, Raster or Engrave. But, I suggest you don’t do this UNTIL AFTER YOU’VE FINISHED YOUR DRAWING AND FITTED IT TO THE INKSCAPE STARTER KIT TEMPLATE. We started changing the lines as we worked but discovered after much drawing that the line widths we’re seemingly changing automatically. VERY FRUSTRATING! But when we left it to the end it was actually very easy to select and change the lines as a group. Knowing this would have saved us a lot of time. John and Dan created another video below that is very helpful with this and I suggest you watch that too.
3. Another reason NOT to change the lines for the Laser Cutter while you are working on your drawing is that they become so darn small that you need to use the magnifying tool to see them and then you can’t see the whole picture. You can avoid this by just drawing in a stroke width you like and changing them all at the end for the Laser.
4. When converting you lines to the right color and width for the Ponoko Laser you’ll need to set the RGBA values in the “Fill and Stroke” window. Within the Starter Kit it currently mentions only the RGB values. This only gets confusing if like me you start setting the A to 0 when thinking it’s the B. This causes your lines to disappear (and your kids to scream). You need to keep the A at 255 (as shown in the video above and image below).
With this much information you should be really dangerous now. Especially if creating customized jewellery, stencils, holiday decorations or any other 2d object is your first goal! Dan is putting together a new Instructable on a piece of jewellery he’s made and we’ll have that up for you to look at very soon.
The urban living masters over at Weburbanist have put together a fantastic post on flat pack furniture. It includes some things we’ve seen before but it’s an excellent list and well worth checking out. Some of the designers have really gone over the edge of creativity with these ideas. We noticed that some of the comments have asked “where can I download the plans for these things?”, and while we haven’t got these particular products on Ponoko yet, we hope that it won’t be long before they are (hint, hint, nudge, nudge Jeremy Grove, Keiji Ashizawa and others).
You can see in our showroom that there are already some ideas that are stunningly creative (my current favourite is the Travel Orange Juicer!) that can be flat packed and sent. And while it’s obvious that the makers of the flatpack furniture ideas on Weburbanist are truly talented. It’s also neat to see that a personal manufacturing tool like Ponoko can enable anyone to test out making their own creations. And to then share those ideas without having to own their CNC machine or laser cutter is pretty out there.
(Hector Serrano’s Reduced Carbon Footprint Souvenirs via dezeen.com)
The next time you travel abroad, think hard before you pick up those chintzy trinkets that surround every tourist attraction - miniature Eiffel Towers or tiny statues of the Sphinx. If you’ve read the Story of Stuff, you’ll know that the souvenirs that fill those shelves were probably mass produced elsewhere then transported thousands of miles to get to the dozens of tiny souvenir shops that swarm around the tourist attraction.
Hector Serrano got creative with his reduced carbon footprint souvenir project, which he created for the Ten Again exhibition of exploring sustainable design. His concept bypasses the traditional cycle of manufacturing and consuming. You send an email to your friend along with a “souvenir” which can be printed out on a 3D printer:
Accessibility to 3D printers is still not so widespread, but it’s becoming closer and closer to hitting mainstream. And while this may not be the first priority in reducing our general carbon footprint, it’s an interesting idea of how such a “little thing” as buying your friend or co-worker a souvenir can cost so much in externalized costs. With 430 million international tourists worldwide (2006), I can pretty much guarantee that a majority of those tourists are buying something to take back home - like the obligatory souvenirs to co-workers, neighbors who watched your house and fed your cat, family and friends who didn’t get to go.
So why just stop with souvenirs? With Ponoko, people could similarly reduce their carbon footprint by creating gifts for people, without having to buy or ship it themselves. Personally designed jewelry (see other people’s samples in the showroom), artwork or other small accessories for your loved one to put together - and all designed by you. It’s one small step, but millions of small steps will surely make a huge impact.
Is make it impossible for them not to try and make things themselves. John Lewis, who is Ponoko’s brilliant Community Manager (you can catch up with him on the Ponoko Forums - go ahead and leave him a message) spent the weekend building a bookcase. John wrote about it on his own blog and I’ve reposted below. As we’ve found before, using Ponoko produces three benefits that you just can’t buy.
The things you make fit where you need them.
The feeling of achievement from creating in reality the ideas in your mind. As John says it’ll spin you out!
Your wife loves you more (this is of immeasurable value…. trust me).
I have to add that your mates are pretty impressed with you as well. Take it away John!
The weekend just gone S mentioned she wanted to buy a bookcase for a specific nook in our lounge. After a fruitless search through the interior design shops on Thorndon Quay I remembered this cool web start-up I’ve been working at for the last 7+ months where you can make your own stuff!
It was great fun. Actually it was lots of hard work but sooo much more fun than I thought it would be. It spins me out a little that I made my own bookcase (and it works…).
Well here we are already a couple of weeks into 2008! Last year was a crazy busy time for all of us at Ponoko and we are expecting even more of the same this year - it’s certainly started that way. Yesterday we were lucky enough to be featured in the NZ Herald (one of NZ’s largest newspapers). We were in great company in 2007 as fellow Kiwis innovated on the web and created startups that generated buzz online throughout the world.
Some of the companies include PlanHQ, Xero, Eurekster, Sonar6, and Madeit.com. A very diverse group of start-ups. I’ve personally had a chance to meet some of the employees and founders at a couple of these companies and I can tell you they are all really committed to one thing - helping people achieve goals that matter to them. Whether that means making accounting easy, helping you grow your business, or making your first robot. Keep up the good work everyone, hope you have a great 2008.
