Unqiue Plastique

First typography cufflink prototypes arrive - and they rock!!!

This morning the UPS guy brought me my first prototype cufflinks from those nice people at @shapeways…  and they’re awesome.

They’ve done what I set out to achieve, the type looks like it’s floating on your wrist, the supporting arm structure means you tend not to see the horizontal bar holding them up, so the type isn’t distorted from the character shapes.  They read properly, the resolution of the print gives a smooth outline and they look good.

The supporting arms are just under 2mm deep, so not very strong but fortunately the fact each character as at least 2 or 3 positioned behind it means they distribute the pressure on the letter quite effectively, making the plastic ones feel sturdy with only a little flex in the bar when you put them on, hard to notice.  They’re definitely strong enough for the purpose. 

The silver ones are rock solid.

The arm and button design works effectively too, in fact, I’m delighted at how well the 3D model actually translated into reality, it’s quite hard to guess how small dimensions will look from an image on a monitor, but they actually work better than I’d imagined.

The next step is to create a full range.  Now the engineering is sorted out it’s time to get creative and explore the font options.  FS Lola Extrabold Italic works very well, time to find some serifs and see if trad fonts can cut it.  Bold cuts work best, italics have great 3D potential because of the surfacing, but I don’t want to limit the options too much until I’ve done more testing.