Your thoughts please...

[harve]

I was asked to make wooden picture frames with the year, team and child's name for a cheerleading and basketball team. Here is a picture of my test frame. Please have a look and let me know what I should do to make it more aesthetic. Don't hold back, you will not offend me in the least. I think it looks pretty rough myself and am not satisfied in sending it out as is.

This was done in Oak all text is .55" arial font with an Onsrud 37-21 engraving bit.

1. My text is choppy (Notice the 0's in the year) and a little "fuzzy" around the outer edge of the letters but some light sanding fixes that. Just curious if the "fuzziness" is a warning that my speed or feed rate are not correct.

2. It's hard to tell in the picture, but the year on the right looks different than the year on the left. Instead of the 0's being ovals, they are somewhat jagged or squiggly, if that is actually a word. I used Partsworks, I mirrored the left year and moved the copy to the right so I don't understand why they do not look the same. Difference in the grain of wood possibly?

The attachment size limitation makes it pretty hard to notice the flaws I have described, sorry.


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[harold_weber]

Hey Mike, you could get nearly DOUBLE the resolution on the posted picture frame itself by simply cropping off all the background outside of the frame with a photo editor and then resize down to that allowed on this forum.

What I do for similar items is:
>DO NOT use a wood like oak with coarse pores (reason given below)
>first spray a coat of clear
>spray a coat of flat black into letters
>sand the flat surface to remove overspray. If you use oak you will find you have to do excessive sanding to remove all the black overspray.
>spray another coat of clear.

The flat black tends to mask any small defects in the letters. An alternate method is to use paint mask, which is mentioned several areas on this forum.

A quick way to add a little more appeal to the item is to cut a border inwards from the edge(s) as in the example below:

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[harve]

Thanks Harold. What type of wood do you recommend?

Here is a cropped picture with higher resolution.
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[harve]

Sorry, here is the higher res.
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[harold_weber]

Mike, I use a lot of soft maple because it has very small pores and I can get "shorts" at low cost. Oak is fine if you're not going to try to paint the letters.

Even with your higher resolution, I don't see anything that I would call squiggly (and that word is in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary). Ask a couple of your customers what they think of it.

[gerald_martin]

It looks like you're using solid wood, which is fine - but have you considered MDF? The core material in mdf will absorb more stain than the veneer, giving excellent contrast to your lettering. See picture of one of my plaques.

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[henrik_o]

Well, your ingoing design determinant is an inward rectangle -- one could play with that shape as well but let's say we have a rectangle. To follow one basic design 'script', the opposite of a rectangle is a circle, so one may want to play with that a little to see if it is possible to include a circular/oval shape (or hints of one) to give some contrast, for the basic shape, for the juxtaposition of text elements, or both, etc.

Let's say we find something we like, we could then decide whether we want even symmetrics or if we want to 'weight' the design in a specific direction. I like archs, I dunno why but I do, so I usually find a way to include them.

A quick and dirty sketch that has the main rectangular shape, a little circulars to add contrast, plus a heavy arch to define weight could look something like


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Move the basic elements around, subtract and add, and you have a lot of options.

As Harold notes above, the pores of oak make it a peculiar finishing species, but I have found that if I use a waterbased stain/dye and apply it to the lettering with a brush the 'overbrush' can usually be sanded off quite easily with an orbital sander, without having to pre-coat the sign. One should always test it on the material in question, certainly.

[harve]

Gerald, I did not consider MDF, but after seeing your work with it, I will.

Henrik, that is an awesome rough draft. If I weren't under such a short time constraint, I would love to use your design. Yours definitley takes your attention away from the text, where mine makes the text the primary focus.

I failed to mention that I do not have to finsih the frames, the coach wants to finish them to save $$$. Sounds like I may be better off just to throw in the finishing for the same price in order to save myself from having to send out something I am not satisfied with.

Is there a certain font that looks better than Arial for this application?