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On a visit to
Somerville Open Studios
I stopped by
Lenni Armstrong's workspace,
where she produces a variety of accessories geared toward enhanced visibility
for cyclists and pedestrians, especially at night.
One key element in this is incorporation of retroreflective vinyl, which
embeds glass beads that reflect light almost exactly back toward where
it came from, within a very narrow angle.
It is the essential element in any retro-reflective application, including road
signs, lane striping, safety vests and barriers, and numerous others.
The angle between most vehicle headlights and a driver's eyes at a typical
sighting distance along a road is very narrow, so retroreflection works
well to passively highlight any object at night.
While at the studio, I remembered that my hiking pack had the original
"(bf) OK" logo on the outer pocket in printed paper covered by clear tape,
which served its purpose but was getting fairly beat-up at that point.
What better way to upgrade that than turn it into a retroreflective graphic
with the
updated all-symbolic logo?
I pointed Lenni to my website and suggested that either logo might be
ideally suited to this process, and she agreed.
So later on I reached out to her asking about possibly commissioning some
artwork, and it turned out that it might make more sense to simply attend one
of the classes she periodically offers, and for the most part make the new
artwork myself as an imprinted fabric patch I could sew on.
Longish story short, I went to the class, and while it turned out that the
logo as it stands has detail a little too fine to really suit the vinyl-cutting
process, I was able to rescue a suitable border and heat-press a workable
graphic onto black backing cloth.
The vinyl is nominally a gray/silver color, but its real magic happens with
incident light -- here is what it looks like when lit from different angles.
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