We get lots of deliveries and know the drivers can’t always stop to eat or drink. So about four years ago we started putting out a basket of snacks and drinks for them. My wife assembled this sign with stock letters to let them know we appreciate how hard they work:
It works, but the letters fall off easily. This riled my instincts as a sign painter, artist, and engineer. Then, I discovered LEGO DOTS. I’ve built from kits, but nothing original. This was my chance to get started designing my own LEGO creations.
The sign painter in me visualized the sign. We bought a LEGO plate and two bags of DOTS. After a half hour of pushing DOTS on the plate and popping them up to rearrange them, my engineering kicked in.
I went to my trusty iMac, booted up Picta Graphic, and made a grid. The LEGO plate is a 10 inch square with a 32 X 32 stud grid. To make my model grid easy to view, a stud is represented as 40 X 40 pixel square. So a side of the plate is 40 X 32 = 1280.
I drew the DOT shapes and copied a blue color from a LEGO photo. After about a dozen and a half variations on the sign, I made a bold move. I used only the square and quarter circle shapes and abandoned the circle and tab shapes.
Knowing what we now needed, we bought more DOTS and finished the sign. We started a frame around it and will probably play around with the colors and add some decorations.
The artist in me needed closure so I designed a full alphabet. Here are the rules for the font:
- the em block is 7 DOTS high X 6 DOTS wide.
- the stroke width is 1 DOT.
- use only squares and quarter circles.
- the top of a vertical stroke is finished with a left-facing quarter circle.
- the bottom of a vertical stroke is finished with a right-facing quarter circle.
- a “leaf” is formed from 2 quarter circles with their flat edges touching.
- a diagonal can be formed by arranging leaves horizontally or vertically.
- the A, E, F, H bars are on the 4th row.
- the Q tail drops 1 square below the standard em block.
Now I’m thinking about making a LEGO statue of Sid Snidsnail, my animated cartoon character in the MoviesByMartino RU-vid channel.
Making signs with LEGO DOTS is fun, but even if that’s not your kind of fun, we encourage you to thank your delivery drivers however you can.
27 сен 2021
