This week marks the beginning of a 3-session stint in the Champaign-Urbana Fabrication Laboratory (FabLab). It’s been my favorite class session by far, as not only were we allowed into a space that truly embodied the maker mindset, but also were allowed a glimpse into what was possible with the resources available to us. It also made me feel a pang of regret, not venturing out and finding this space earlier in my college career.

Duncan, our guiding hand in this lab session, walked us through the basics of a software called Inkscape, which is an open-sourced vector based graphics software much like Adobe Illustrator or iDraw. This led up to using the laser cutter machinery to raster or Because I’m fairly competent with Illustrator already, picking up Inkscape was a walk in the park and I was ready to laser cut almost instantly. Again, because my experience within the FabLab this week was so intuitive, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much I could have learned if I had discovered the people and the resources here before my ultimate semester.

Because I’m in the process of starting a clothing brand, I thought it might be a good idea to see how a potential logo would look on a physical item. I chose a remix of a the Cupertino helmet and applied it to a simple sketch notebook and it resulted in the following:

I’m pretty happy with the result, and look forward to return to the FabLab in my free time as well as the next class session. I’m also very excited to try my hand at arduinos. I’ve been in a rut so far, in trying to figure out what my semester project will be about, and am hoping that more hands on experience will free up my thoughts.