Designing The Belly Bands

BELLY BANDS

For my 5 small publications i knew i wanted to create belly bands for them. I chose to use fluorescent orange stock as part of my colour choices so i decided they would be the best colour for the belly bands also because there vibrant they'll give the publications a bit of variation and make them stand out.

My first initial idea was to have belly bands around envelopes but i soon realised there would be to much packaging so i decided to have a belly band around each publication and then create some kind of box to put them all into. 

I definitely wanted to use the laser cutter for my publication belly bands so i would either cut the title of my book out through the belly band or a circle so you can possibly see the number

Designs-


As i have designed the front of my booklets to have a number on them i knew my belly band needed to be a large strip with a circle cut out.

I mocked up several different sized belly bands and printed them out A3 so i could see how big they would look after been laser cut.

I tested out cutting belly bands from the laser cutter before i did it on my stock incase it went wrong.

I wanted to place my full document onto the wooden block in the laser cutter so i would be able to cut it without having burn marks on my work as the wooden block would make my work hover. 

Unfortunately that wasn't an option as my stock was to large so i was suggested to go and cut out the the belly bands on the guillotine and use the laser cut to purely cut the circles out . 

This would work well because the width of my circle fit into the width of one of the metal frames thats in the laser cutter.Removing the frame would stop the laser bouncing back up and making a mark on my stock.

To cut out my circle i had to press online on the machine and follow the process just like  i had done previous for other experimentation but to recut it was really simple.

After pressing online i pressed enter twice and it gave me the option to recut. I just needed to make sure i put my stock in the same place every time.

I repeated this process 5 times to achieve all 5 of my belly bands.

Here are all five belly bands on the right is a mock up of it around an a5 booklet.