Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Laser Cut Logo

Creating a logo can be a headache. It can be difficult to come up with something that would encapsulate everything you’d want to convey about your brand in an image. It was no different for me when I was coming up for the logo to be the face of LaserCutHub. I wanted something that would be simple to create, easy to understand and have the right amount of creativity. I tried to stick with the following steps:

1. Identify the audience – laser cutters!
2. Research and Inspiration
3. Conceptualize
4. Design
5. Finalize

Coming Up with the Idea (Research and Inspiration)

As stated above, I wanted something simple, yet effective to be my logo and to draw in laser cutters. I know letters are used extensively in logos, but it makes it easy to translate a word or multiword noun into a singular image. So, of course, I went with the upper-case L, C, and H to stand for LaserCutHub. Obviously, this can be a little bland, so I wanted to spice it up with something that put it in the genre of what LaserCutHub is all about: laser cutting! (Kept my audience in mind!) That led me to include a design of some sort of laser that would be incorporated into the logo. I thought simple block letters with a rudimentary laser drawing would hit both simple and effective for the LaserCutHub logo.

Drawing The Logo (Conceptualize and Design)

Obviously, in order to pull an idea out of your head there needs to be some sort of medium and program to draw it. As an engineer I enjoy and am proficient in CAD drawing programs and so I went to design my logo in LibreCAD. The first thing I started with was the block letters to keep it simple and have a blank canvas to then work in the laser. This is what I had after creating the letters:

With that down, I was moving onto the more complicated part of the logo, trying to figure out how to incorporate the laser. I wanted to create something that was seamlessly worked into the letters but it was clear that there was a laser. That landed me on creating a gantry holding the laser with the beam being one of the vertical lines of the “H”. Selecting the first vertical, the left side of the “H”, allowed the laser to be worked more into the center of the letters and be the focal point of the logo. I also thought to slightly separate the beam from the rest of the “H” to make it stand out even more. That left me with this:

Now this was almost the final product for me, but I like symmetry. It seemed that the top was a little design heavy with nothing on the bottom. I also thought that it might be good to put one more detail in the logo to further illustrate that this is a laser cutting logo. That led me to place something at the bottom of the logo that would underline the letters and have a cutaway at the location of the beam intersection. That led to the final log which is this:

Finishing the logo in LibreCAD would not be the final medium for my logo. This is a laser cutting brand so I needed to laser cut my logo in order to have the full effect I wanted. In order to cut in my design, I needed to transfer over my design into LightBurn.

Transferring the Design to LightBurn (Design)

I do all my cutting with my 40W XTool laser cutter with LightBurn. I highly recommend using LightBurn to interface with a laser cutter as it’s simple to use. It also provides several tools that are helpful to anyone. In order to move my LibreCAD design into LightBurn, there were just a couple of quick steps to follow. First, I needed to save my logo in LibreCAD as a .dxf file. Second, I needed to open up LightBurn and select File -> Import and select the .dxf file. This let me drop in the full drawing straight into LightBurn quick and easy. I wanted to perform two functions on the logo, solid engraving and cut lines, to create a more layered design. I planned to make the beam of the laser a dark, solid etching so that it stood out. To do that I needed to create a separate layer with different cut layer settings. When importing the logo, I found that the beam was connected to the rest of the laser. In order to allow the beam to be a different layer, I first needed to break it apart from the rest of the laser. To do this I selected the beam and then from the toolbar selected Arrange -> Break Apart. This allowed me to select the beam and create a separate cut pattern for it and finally came up with this in LightBurn:

Cutting and Final Product (Finalize)

I ended up cutting on 3mm wood using the following settings for each layer shown in the screenshot above:

• Layer 1 – Black – 60 mm/s, Power 15%, 2 passes
• Layer 2 – Blue – 90 mm/s, Power 15%, 1 pass

I ran a few small trial cuts to get the above settings and thought this would provide me with what I was looking for. After running my laser, I got the final product!

With that I have my logo for LaserCutHub! I hope the journey from start to end helped to illustrate the design, thought process, and cutting to create a final product! I hope you enjoyed the trip from concept to creation and learned something along the way!

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