Vinyl Cutting

Idea

At the Charlotte Latin Fab Lab, each year every Fab student is expected to make a sticker that will be permanently displayed on a wall. The only requirement was that the sticker had to use multiple colors and be sufficiently complex. As an avid computer programmer, I decided to use make a sticker of the Eclipse IDE logo. To edit the image of the logo, I used use Gimp, a software that I was first introduced to in Week 2.

Design

To begin designing my sticker, I had to dissect the logo into each different color. Based on the colors of vinyl that I had in the Lab, I decided to use three colors: gold, purple, and white. I first downloaded the logo from Eclipse's Artwork Site.

After importing the logo into Gimp, I first cropped the image to remove the text from the logo, as I wouldn't be designing that part into my sticker.

I was then left with the following image:

Using Gimp's Fuzzy Select tool, I was able to separate portions of the logo by color: gold, purple, and white.

However, the white part of the logo didn't show up in the image since the background was also white. I knew that in order to trace the outline of each part of the sticker in Silhouette Studio, the white portion would need to be visible. I then realized that the white portion did not necessarily need to be white in color - as long as the software could differentiate between two colors and trace the edges of each color, it would work. Thus, I changed the color of the white portions to be black, and simply cut out the design on white vinyl.

Assembly

I then imported each image into Silhouette Studio and traced it. The tracing (red lines) is where the vinyl cutter will cut.

After cutting each design out on its respectively colored vinyl, I arranged all the stickers together on a piece of transfer tape.

I then peeled off the backs of the sticker and stuck it to the wall with the transfer tape still on.

Finally, I took off the transfer tape and allowed the sticker to stay on the wall. Here's the final design!