Making Banners and Signs in Vinyl

Steps

1. complete overall conceptual design
2. complete strategic design
3. design tool paths for graphics
4. cut and apply graphics

Overall Concept Design

• Process - often in conjunction with a client
• determine overall size
• determine graphics
• choose substrate
  • colour and number of colours
  • size
  • type - eg. vinyl banner (colour), corrugated plastic, glass, magnetic, paper , foam board, expanded styrene, painted wood.
• Completed when
  • list of materials needed
  • a preliminary layout completed
    • signed by client
    • to scale
    • estimated cost

Strategic Design

• To complete the drawing you must determine which layers of which colour of vinyl will be applied to the substrate in order to achieve the desired result.
  • considerations
    • order that vinyl will be cut, Consider 4 different ways to make the same image in vinyl in the diagram below (there are more ways). What shapes and in what order is the most optimal for you to use to make your design?

• size limitations of machine (max. 1000 mm in y direction and 600 mm in x direction, recommended 800 mm in y direction and 500 mm in x)
  • orientation of vinyl
  • make in parts
• optimization of the material
• alignment and relative orientation of the elements to be cut (you may wish to cut certain items at the same time because they will be difficult to align later)
• Completed when;
• There exists a set of sketches (roughly to scale), one for each colour of vinyl to be cut.

Tool path Creation

• Create Drawing (Vectorworks) then export as .dxf
  • drawing lines
  • dealing with text
  • dealing with pixel images
  • saving dxf files
• Import .dxf and generate tool path (Visual Mill)
  • importing file, and setting up for tool path generation
  • selecting tool and generating tool path
  • checking
  • post processing

Cutting the Vinyl

• cut the vinyl

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