Name Plates

I took an aesthetics of design course in my senior year of my studies at CU Boulder. I figured it was a good way to cap off my engineering degree and round the corner to something relevant from my first degree.

On the first day we were given the assignment of making a name plate to put in front of us on the table. The task was to make the name plate communicate something about who you are, using only the aesthetics of its design to express that message. Well, I wasn't going to be satisfied with only one name plate, so I decided to make it a task to put up a new name plate each day, saying something different about myself with each one.

I don't have any recollection of what the order was here, so I will just describe these from top to bottom and left to right.

The wood sign is, I believe, in Helvetica. I ran a film series for this class, and I intentionally timed a couple name plates in that font for the same week that I showed the Helvetica documentary. It is laser cut/embossed and I had experimented with fully cutting out each letter, suspending the floating pieces with acrylic that was also laser cut, but I couldn't find a good piece of acrylic with similar dimensions in the time I had.

Speaking of acrylic, the frosted hunk of plastic on the bottom-left came from this plastic supplier in Lafayette. They do a scrap sale once a month (used to be every Friday) and I bought a few pieces like this one, which had machining/tool marks and large frosty sides. They looked like large, dirty blocks of ice.

The one that looks like letters cut from magazines is referencing DIY/punk. I even used an image of me from high school, which is a rare thing (I generally refused to be in a photo). This might have been the only name plate that I made with Photoshop/PowerPoint and printed onto paper.

The LEGO name plate refers to the fact that I am Swiss, as did the Helvetica plates. Both with the white Swiss cross and with the lower-case "d" in my last name. When we updated my Swiss passport I was told by the lady at the consulate that I spelled my last name wrong. Because of how my name gets parsed by computers, I spell it "dePerrot", and she insisted it's spelled "de Perrot".

My last name plate there is made of cards I found at a local flea market. I think they were used to teach spelling/word construction phonetically. I cut a groove in one of the ice slab plastic blocks I got from the local plastic supplier and placed these upright in the groove, but I also shuffled them around throughout the class session.

As a bonus name plate, I befriended a lady in the class who was from Saudi Arabia. She was very kind, had an interest in fashion design, and she attended many of my film series nights. She made for me this name plate, which is my name in Arabic. The fun thing about making so many name plates is I always have something interesting to bring to work when I am in the office, and this is one I really like to display in-person.