About
Technovo is a small family company in Czech republic, focusing on high quality furniture combining metal frames and wooden desks. As a way to offer their customers something above the usual product line, Technovo tasked me to create set of ilustration to be lasered out of metal.
Challenge
The ideas was to make 12 different illustrations, that could be laser-cut out of a metal sheet. 6 motives for men, 6 for women. While me and the Technovo's owner, Martin Novotný are both craftsmen with years of experience, it took us weeks to get into sync. Martin had a clear vision in mind, but to establish common visual language was extremely challenging. Mostly because there were little objective criteria to evaluate outputs and we both have very different ideas in mind.
Also, I never worked with laser cutting technology before and couldn't really imagine technical problems that can occur.
Solution
After establishing visual languge through iterations of moodboards, sketches and descriptions for each idea, we finaly began the work. Soon we realized, that we do not really want clean vector lines but soomething more rugged, something with "hand-made feel". That brought a brand new problem, because exports from .AI to .DXF file format for laser cutting created a huge number or extra anchor points (added complexity). Also, every sharp corner got burned during the cut, as laser beam had to change direction at a certain point and was too slow. So we had to find a way to minimize number of anchor points and change curvature for sharp corners. Then to find way how to fit as many designs as possible on big sheet of metal, so we can minimize costs of production... The learning curve was pretty steep on this project, the more awe are proud of the final result and joy our products can now bring to customers.
Here is the first part:
- The bull
- Good! (meaning every obsctacle is also a way, face your fears)
- Memento mori (face your death)
- Warrior
- Struggle never ends
- Labyrinth of life
