20160208 Display Lasers Illustrator

20160208 Display Lasers Accessories

Today's creativity is about design. When we play with our miniature soldiers, there are the soldier models themselves, and many available accessories. There are storage cases, dice, rules, terrain, special measurement devices, special markers, a plethora of extra kit.

Today I was designing display boards. In this specific instance display boards are 3mm MDF boards that are designed in Adobe Illustrator. The .svg Illustrator output files are converted into a format for a computer controlled cutting laser, which produces circular bases, and a cutout that can be placed on top of the extra blank board. The miniatures are then glued to the bases, painted, and then returned to the holes from which they were cut. Since everything matches, it also strongly visually helps to locate when you have lost a figure during play.

This makes the miniatures look very orderly, they are nicely displayed, and you have a quality storage system. I base everything off the international standard of paper, A4, as you can then always get stationery accessories to hold the products.

The picture below is a mock up. These are 15mm figures that I have layed out on half an A4 sheet.

I will then simulate these shapes on Illustrator. Once I have declared my design finished, it will be emailed to my friends who run a miniatures company. I will get samples of the product to check everything. If the product pumps out a few sales, I will get store credit and some stock, if it was wildly successful I would get cash.

It is mainly a love job for friends, and as a love job I mainly design for systems I play, for armies I own, so I can use the demo stuff to store my own gear :)

In case anyone is interested, this is the shop run by my my friends:
http://www.aetherworks.com.au/

and an example of what the laser cut board looks like.

http://store.aetherworks.com.au/product_info.php?cPath=176_277&products_id=25073