For product design, our task/challenge was to create a lightbox of a place that we missed and couldn’t visit during the pandemic. For my lightbox, I chose a lake view in Canada. The lake view my lightbox is based on has abnormally blue water and high mountains surrounding it.

I learned new techniques and skills while making this lightbox like using Adobe Illustrator to make the layers and box. Most of the project was done on Adobe Illustrator. There were skills like joining shapes, importing images from TheNounProject and changing the line color so that the laser cutter receives different messages. Some Illustrator tools were needed like expanding/tracing, group/ungroup, and rounding corners. There were also skills like acrylic painting where we used a card with a dad joke written on it then hid the answer with paint so it can be scratched off and revealed as an example. There were also pieces like the LED where we needed to customize it ourselves for length, where it went in the box, or how compact it needed to be so it can hide behind a layer.

There are also some things I would change about my lightbox. First of all, I would change the mountains in the back layer so it would be more obvious and not nearly completely blocked by the other layer. Another thing I would change is the hill layer. Instead of using semi-circles, I would find a good hill shape to replace it so overall the lightbox would be more realistic. The last thing I would change is the color of the sky layer and lake. They are the same color but if one of the layers had a lighter shade, there would be more contrast and show that the color of the lake is abnormally blue.

One piece of advice I would give is to check your layers before you laser cut them since some pieces could be too thin and snap off or some details could be too difficult to

Overall, I think my project was successful with a few minor details here and there. My biggest success was that the layers came out the way I wanted and the details were there. An obstacle I faced was painting the mountain details since I needed to tape them, paint it, then take off the tape for some small details.