But sometimes we have people walking into the office that are looking to get other types or products/laptops laser etched. And today Nikhil walked in looking to get an etching done for the girlfriend. The laptop was an Asus U45J. The laptop is silver so we thought it would look pretty cool. Usually the resulting color for silver materials is either black or white, depending on the type of plastic/faux metal they are made of.

Once we setup the design for Nikhil, we first ran a little test on one corner just to see the resulting color and if we would be able to use gradients and shades of grey on the artwork. Once the test was done and we saw the etched surface turned white we were all happy! Indeed looks very cool. Here are some pic of the final laser etched Asus laptop.

Today we laser etched our first iPhone4! We were a bit nervous about etching this all glass phone. We started off slowly by running the laser at very low power just to see how this type of glass would react, and then ran it again at slightly higher power, but still below the normal glass setting that we use.

Here are the results (the pictures didn’t turn out that great! We even took them before cleaning the device).

With this idea in mind, we are about to launch our own laser etched wooden skins with your custom artwork etched on. The result is truly amazing and we are sure yo will love it! We will be releasing more details on the products so keep an eye here to see how you can customize your Macbook, Macbook Pro, iPad and iPhone 4 with laser etched wooden skins and your own custom artwork on it.

As we expected, the results were great, as the iPad has exactly the same type of backing as the original iPhone, so the laser etching of the iPad was perfect. Have a look at the pictures below to see the etching process.

Remember, we still have 2 free iPad etchings to give away. Get yours now.

The pictures…

This project required some manufacturing and assemble that we weren’t too familiar with, but with the schematics and specifications from the Sportsnet creative department, the results were great. The awards look really cool and it was lot’s of fun working on these.

Have a look at the pics.

From the show: Lucas is sleeved out with Star Wars tattoos, making him look a bit like an enforcer in some kind of sci-fi Yakuza. Carrying around a decidedly factory default-looking laptop is not befitting a man who clearly holds customization near to his heart.

Very cool! This was a fun afternoon and the guys from Butterscotch were great to work with.

The design was provided to us, which looked really cool, and we had to produce several cards, with variable media, i.e., different Username and Password on each card to allow the VIP guest to login to the Cartel website and try out the new features.

Other than variable media, the one side of the cards was to be etched with a ‘full bleed’ like you usually do when printing paper business cards, where the print goes all the way to the very edge of the document. With a laser, this is easier said than done, because you need to make your template very precise so you can etch more than one card at a time.  The last obstacle was the fact that some of the content in the card was extremely small to etch (comparable to printing in Arial 5pt) which is really small and etching on anodized aluminum looks like it ‘bleeds’ a little on the material.

We were able to get them etched, after a bit of testing, and they look really sweet! We are also a preferred partner with The Game Cartel so we really wanted to make these cards look as nice as possible.

There were a few different challenges in getting this done: the size of the velvet pieces was a problem. Fitting all that material inside the laser while keeping it flat was not easy. But Kerry being a designer, found a nice way to fold it and leave some excess hanging out the front of the laser. Second, we never etched velvet before, so we testing many different types of velvet and different settings in the laser. We found one that Kerry really liked and her client also liked the result. Once these issues were solved, we etched the real pieces, straight from England, UK.

Here are some pictures of the results. Nice, eh?

Today we etched a Dell m6400 latop, which to my surprise, did look really sharp. The laptop shell was made of plastic, which I’m always unsure of the resulting texture and most of all, resulting color of the laser etching. But the etching turned almost pure white, like all the aluminum laptops do. Check out the pictures below and in our Flick gallery on the right side.

The ultimate cool gift… fully customized. Have a look.