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Many customers come to us wanting to turn their logos into signs or stencils made from metal or plastic. This ranges from small laser cut acrylic pieces to place on employees' desks to large outdoor displays meant to be visible from the street. Waterjet cut stainless steel and aluminum are both popular choices for metal signs due to their appearance and durability.
Let's take a look at how we turned the logo for Inkscape, a popular open source graphics editor, into real stainless steel and aluminum signs.
We started with the official Inkscape vector logo. When imported into Inkscape, here's what it looks like:
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It's a pretty logo, but you'll notice right away that this design does not lend itself well to being waterjet cut as a sign or stencil. This design has several gradient areas and a waterjet cuts all the way through the target material, meaning that we need to reduce this logo to simple solid areas (positive space) and holes (negative space).
In Inkscape, when we do View > Display Mode > Outline from the menu, we can see many of the individual paths that make up the logo.
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Deleting all but the paths that give us the black and white colors yields the outline shown below.
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If you've read our article on turning a logo into a sign, you'll know that there are 4 general approaches toward turning a logo into a sign:
1. Logo as negative space, disconnected pieces
2. Logo as negative space, bridged pieces
3. Logo as positive space, bridged pieces
4. Logo as positive space, disconnected pieces
Sign types #2 and #3 allow the design to be cut and installed as a single piece. Type #2 is also a great choice for a creating a stencil. Types #1 and #4 require that the finished piece be set on a background for display, like a wall. In this article, we'll turn the Inkscape logo into both a #2 and a #3 sign.
The next step will be to resize the entire logo to be the final size that we want. In this case, we're making the logo 6 inches wide. (Note that this is not the final size of the overall finished piece in the type #2 sign, as that sign type requires a border.) We'll choose Edit > Select All from the menu to select everything to be resized.
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Next, the resize lock (1) should be selected to make sure that the file resizes proportionally. The units should be inches (2) and a width of 6.0 inches entered (3)
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This resizes the logo way beyond the original size of the document, so let's fix that. Choose File > Document Properties from the menu.
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The Document Properties dialog will appear. In this dialog, we need to set the default units as inches (1), and make the overall document size 8x8 inches (2 & 3).
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We'll be moving the logo around as a single unit, so we must select everything again (Edit > Select All) and group them together with Object > Group.
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Since we're starting with a type #2 sign, or stencil, we need to make a background frame on which the logo will sit. This is done with the rectangle drawing tool.
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We can click and drag to draw in the drawing area to make a rectangle. We will set the fill color of the rectangle to be white and the outline to black to make it easier to see. You can access the fill and stroke style by selecting the rectangle in the drawing and clicking on the Fill and Stroke styles on the bottom right hand corner of the window.
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This pops up the Fill and Stroke panel where you can set the appropriate styles.
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We want our frame to be 7x7 inches. This can be set by selecting the rectangle and setting the dimensions in the area just above the drawing.
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You'll notice that the frame rectangle is covering up the logo. You can fix this with Object > Lower to Bottom.
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To align the logo in its frame, select everything and chose Object > Align and Distribute to open the Align and Distribute panel. We want to center everything in the page, so select Page from the dropdown (1). Then center horizongally and vertically using the horizontal and vertical centering buttons (2 and 3).
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We now have a logo as shown below, centered in a square frame.
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Since we want the white areas to be solid material, we'll need to connect them to the outer background areas. We can do this with rectangles that are 1/8 inch wide. These rectangles will have a solid white fill and no stroke outline.
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We'll need a few of these to hold everything steady. The "lake" feature requires an extra long bridge.
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Instead of bridging the highlights on the 3 ink drops at the bottom, we'll just expand the ellipse to touch the outer edge. This follows the appearance of the original logo which had a gradient effect in this area.
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Longtime users of Inkscape or and Big Blue Saw will know that our bridges aren't quite right yet. We need the drawing outlines to reflect exactly the shape we want to cut out. Let's take a look at the outline view.
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As you can see, the rectangles from the bridges overlap the outlines of the rest of the pieces. This means that when we save this design, we haven't provided an outline to cut. Fortunately Inkscape offers an easy solution for fixing this. (This technique was brought to my attention in a YouTube video by professorlooney). By using the fill tool, we can make all the white areas in the drawing a single path entity. Just choose the fill tool and click in the white area inside the drawing.
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We've filled the newly created path with red and outlined it so that it's easier to see. We'll move the new outline out of the way and delete all the original objects.
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Now we have just the exact outline that we want to cut. Looking at the drawing in outline mode confirms this.
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Finally, we need to add mounting holes to be able to hang the piece on the wall.
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This design can now be exported using Big Blue Saw's DXF Export for Inkscape or saved as EPS then translated to DXF with pstoedit. This gives us a DXF file for use with Big Blue Saw's instant online quoting and ordering system.
When this type of design is made from metal and placed against a dark background, it resembles the original logo. But what if we wanted to make this a different way: with the mountain made of metal and without the framing rectangle? This is possible as well.
This type of sign needs bridges as well, similar to what we've seen already, so I won't go over all the details of making the design. I will note that in the image below, I used curves with a 1/8" wide
stroke width to bridge the main mountain to the splotches of ink at the bottom.
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Using the same bucket fill technique as before gives the outline for the final part shown below.
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After cutting, the parts come off of the waterjet looking like the pieces below.
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These aren't yet something you would want hanging on your wall. There are marks from the mill that produced the raw material, as well as from the waterjet and handling. This can be cleaned up, however. Big Blue Saw offers Basic Finish and Bead Blast finish to help parts look their best. I used sandpaper and a paper towel with denatured alcohol to clean up these parts.
Here are the finished parts in 0.06" thick stainless steel:
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Also in 3/8" thick aluminum:
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The materials are both grey metals, but aluminum has a brighter appearance. Choose the material that best meets the look you're going for. I will say that people tend to associate stainless steel with expensive products and associate aluminum with inexpensive, mass-produced products. The image below shows the color difference. Stainless steel is on the left, aluminum on the right.
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Other metals work well in signs. Brass works especially well for a nautical, steampunk, or Victorian look. Copper is often associated with kitchens, though it can corrode or develop a patina. Carbon steel gives a more industrial look.
What thickness to choose can depend on how you're mounting the final piece, the lighting, and the effect you're looking to achieve. If you want the sign to really pop out of the wall, choose a thicker material. Again, the aluminum below is 3/8 inch thick, and the stainless steel is just under 1/16" thick, or 0.06", about as thick as a penny.
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Get started by uploading your design to our online quoting system and turn your logo into a sign or stencil made from metal, plastic, wood, and more.
If you need help with creating a cuttable outline, adding bridges, or choosing a material, contact us and we'll be glad to help.
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