Kevin Danenberg's website and blog

Last month, the professor in my graphic design class asked us to each think of a pair of glasses that would be instantly recognizable as those of a celebrity, but not a pair they already owned.  (So no round wire John Lennon glasses…)  Then we had to draw them on the board for everyone else to guess.  I don’t know where the idea came from, but I instantly thought of George Foreman and drew a crude chalk rendition of a pair of his grills on glasses frames.  This was readily identified by the class.

Well, turns out that our homework assignment was to then build a pair of the glasses we imagined!  This was our first three-dimensional assignment.  At first, it may not seem like graphic design, but this assignment involved merging symbols, which we’ve been learning is critical to effective graphic design.  The fabrication aspect of this homework was also important, because graphic artists aren’t always working in two dimensions.  Many graphics wrap around physical objects (from packages to the ads they shrinkwrap on buses!), and you never know when a job will require you to mock up a prototype of some sort.

I did have the option of thinking of an easier project, but this was such a good idea and I didn’t want to back down.  So I sketched out some designs in my notebook on the way home and hit the art stores the next day for supplies.  Here are the materials I used:

1 large smoke-tint triangle (for the 0.10" polystyrene)
black and white Premo polymer clay
liquid polymer clay glue
polymer clay gloss
Marblex clay (to stamp the grill)
2 steel eraser shields (for the thin sheet metal)
6 tiny machine screws and nuts
4 poultry lacers
laser printer transparencies
clear laser mailing labels
plastic tags for hanging file folders
acrylic paint

Here are the tools I used:

Dremel
various Dremel bits including diamond wheel and tile cutting
tiny drill bits
aluminum foil
self-healing cutting mat
X-acto knife blades and handles
screwdrivers
scissors
baking sheet
paint brushes
paint palette
paper towel
assorted files (large and small)
2 needle-nose pliers
Sharpie pen
sandpaper
clay sculpting tools
stainless steel ruler
assorted binder clips
masonite boards
sheet glass
large putty knife
acetone
epoxy
various other glues
Inkscape and Photoshop software
large metal washers
oven thermometer
baking sheet
oven

Just to be clear, this is not intended as a step-by-step tutorial.  It took many hours to complete this, and I improvised and backtracked at many points along the way.  I wasn’t very good at photo-documenting every step, especially when my hands were messy with polymer clay.  Also, if you think that I think you’d actually try to do this yourself, then we’ve arrived at a rather curious misunderstanding…

I used Inkscape (a lovely open-source vector graphics application) to design templates for the frame, arms, grill design, and hinge brackets.  Not all beforehand, but as I went along.  The core of my concept was to use the transparent polystyrene of the triangle as the frame of my glasses and attach everything else to that.  This way, the lenses and the frame could be one and the same, thereby simplifying fabrication.  I used my own glasses as a guide to get the frame dimensions right.  In Inkscape, I designed a frame template where each lens would be the bottom of the grill.

Etching the frame design onto the polystyrene

Above, you see my frame template.  I traced the outer border onto my polystyrene triangle to etch the design onto the plastic.  This made a nice guide to cut around.  Oh, and the cutting…let me tell you…time consuming!  Probably the longest phase of project.

Dremel on stun!

Speaking of phase, my Dremel looks like a cool retro Star Trek phaser!

The rough cut

I cut around my etched guide, leaving a slight margin, with the tile cutting bit.  It was a very slow process, mainly because the polystyrene would gum up the bit every half inch or so.  I used a slow setting so that I wouldn’t burn the plastic, but it melted as I went along and would reform in the teeth of my bit until it wound around like thread on a spool.  If it built up too much, I had to soak the bit in acetone to dissolve the plastic.

After the rough cut, I carefully filed, sanded, and Dremeled the edges to a smooth finish.

Grill stamp made of Marblex clay

I used Marblex clay to create a stamp that I’d use to make the grill surfaces with raised grill lines.  (I should have made it thicker…it broke while I was stamping!)  I sculpted on glass using two peices of masonite on either side of the clay to regulate the thickness, pressing down with glass and masonite on the top.  I also used the Marblex to practice sculpting the grill before moving forward with the polymer clay.  This was how I worked out the techniques and shape for the grill tops.

Sculpted grill tops of white Premo

I had considered building a mold for the grill tops, but decided that experimenting with molding techniques would be a waste of time for just two grill tops.  They didn’t need to be exact clones to get the point across, nor was any single peice I sculpted going to be symmetrical enough to be worthy of cloning.  So I crafted two near-duplicates in white Premo using the method I developed while practicing in Marblex.  Basically, I created flat slabs using masonite and glass, sloping from 5mm in the back to 3mm in the front.  Then I traced the grill dimensions using an open paper template and cut away the excess with an X-acto knife.  The ridge in the back and the handle in the front were added as separate peices and sculpted with the X-acto knife.  I got the nice curve of the ridge by rolling the metal handle against the clay.

Grill bottoms in black Premo

I formed the grill bottoms for the lids in black Premo.  I used the stamp I made of Marblex to impress the grill design into the clay.  Unfortunately, the stamp broke during the first impression, so I had to do the second one with shattered pieces.

Grill lids set with hinges

I used metal poultry lacers from the local dollar store to fabricate rods for the hinges.  These bent at fairly neat right angles using two needle-nose pliers and a hard table surface to fold against.  The diamond cutting bit lopped off excess steel.  I designed a template for the hinges in Inkscape so that I could replicate the dimensions.  I also determined the proper hinge distance so that the lids would align properly with the frame.   I sandwiched the hinges into the lid tops and bottoms using liquid polymer clay glue.  Then I baked the lids according to the directions on the Premo clay.  At this point, I had no idea how I was going to attach the hinges to the frame.

Glasses arms ready to bake

I decided to make the arms look like bacon.  I’m sure George Foreman marketing would be quick to point out that the grill can cook lots of healthy things like asparagus.  But bacon’s funnier.  I formed the arms of my glasses using black and white Premo mixed to grey.  I made a template for these, too, so that they’d be symmetrical.  I embedded hinges in the arms and used large metal washers so that they’d bake with the proper curve around the ears.

Poorly painted bacon

Alas, I am not a painter.  Perhaps, I’ll take an acrylics class at SVA in the future.

With most of the fabrication complete, and my Premo components painted and glossed up nicely, I had to address the hinge problem.  I wanted these glasses to be wearable, and I was pretty sure no glue on earth would hold the hinges to the frames strongly enough.  Then it dawned on me, remembering what the polystrene was like to carve, that I might just be able to drill into it.

Frame with drilled holes

I practiced on scraps of polystyrene with tiny drill bits rigged to my Dremel.  (They didn’t fit properly, so I rather unsafely wrapped them in aluminum foil until they did.)  As it turned out, the polystyrene was drillable, as long as I was very careful.  The slightest torsion would cause a split, and the melting plastic would gum up the bit and easily cause said slightest torsion.  After some practice, I drilled my six required holes just fine.  It took some experimenting to find the right hole size for the screws I used.  Just big enough so that the screws would catch the plastic firmly, but not cause cracks.

Partly assembled

I used scissors to snip out thin sheets of steel from eraser shields.  This provided a strong hinge attachments for the arms of the glasses.  As you can see above, the sheet metal folded around the frame is bolted through with a tiny screw.  For the lids, I used thin plastic from hanging file folder tags instead of metal.  There just wasn’t enough usable material on the eraser shields for the larger hinges.

Close-up of a hinge

My original idea, even back at the chalkboard, was for the grill lids to be spring loaded.  They should open and close freely, but also stay open by default so that you can see.  The screwed-on hinge design provided an opportunistic method for spring loading the lids.  I simply took some narrow sheet metal strips and bolted them on the back of the hinges.  The springs flex back and forth with the lids, and keeps the lids open normally.

Spring loaded design

For the final touches, I laser-printed a grill pattern on transparencies for each lens.  I don’t have a detail photo, but you can see the grill pattern in the final photo below.  Also, printed the logo for each grill so that they would look like the real deal!

Authentic logos

I first printed the logos on laser transparencies (pictured above), but they wouldn’t stay glued due to the curved contour of the lids.  So I printed on clear laser mailing labels instead.

Workspace aftermath

This is my project table after I was done.  If it’s not messy, is it art?

So stylish!