Labunski Makercoin

Lesson Plan and Activity:

For this project, I was tasked with designing and creating my own MakerCoin design. The MakerCoin was constrained to the following requirements:

• All coins must be made from an initial revolve resulting in a coin that is 6cm in diameter and 1.25cm in thickness.
• Exceptions can be made if justified and approved
• Must not require ANY supports, (no supports).
• Should be gear-esque in nature.
• Must slope downwards towards the center in some fashion.
• Must incorporate EITHER multi-color technology OR print-in-place moveable parts

For the coin I chose to incorporate multi-color printing technology.

Design Choices:

For my design, I really wanted to have an outer dish and an inner dish. I decided to go with a star shape that I could offset inwards to create both. For the inner dish, I wanted to include a unique element, so I added dimples that follow the dish or bowl shape, mimicking those found on a golf ball. Rather than making evenly sized dimples, I wanted them to gradually increase in size as they moved outward for added variety. Additionally, I wanted to incorporate some edges or corners that stick out from the main dish to add sharp contrast to the rounded elements. You can see the envisioned design in my sketches below:

As I began making my maker coin, the process was very straightforward. The first major design decision involved the dish dimples. In the first image below, you can see that while the dimples get slightly larger toward the edges, there isn’t much variation between them. To address this, I decided to add more randomness—making some holes very large, others quite small, and avoiding any consistent pattern. The second screenshot shows the result after adjusting the hole sizes.

My next design choice was to add some visual and structural depth to my maker coin by creating extrusions and cuts from the holes made in the previous step. Initially, I extruded “towers” of different heights from random holes, as shown in the first picture. However, the flat tops and skinny towers didn’t look particularly interesting. To improve this, I reduced the height of most towers and removed several entirely. Instead of filleting the edges, I added domes on top of each tower to create a more dynamic form. I also incorporated domes extending both upward and downward into the holes, forming cone-shaped towers. To keep the design visually engaging, I made the locations and sizes of the domes as random as possible. You can better see and understand these domes in the second photo.

Another deviation from my original plan was abandoning the idea of having edges or corners extending from the main dish. Instead, I drew triangles and diamonds, which I then extruded and chamfered to achieve the sharper contrast I wanted between the angular and rounded elements. I ensured that the diamonds were evenly spaced and positioned on each point of the dish using a circular sketch pattern. You can see how everything came together below:

Before printing my first coin, I made one final change—removing some of the rounded points on the dish and replacing them with sharper, triangular ones on alternating sections of the outer dish. This added more straight, angular lines to balance the many rounded elements. The before-and-after can be seen in the screenshots below:

After making these changes, I printed my first edition.

I wasn’t fully satisfied with my first maker coin because the color choices didn’t work well, and I saw opportunities to refine the design further. First, I raised the chamfered diamonds on the outer dish since they printed too low and were barely visible. Then, I decided to keep the diamonds on the triangular points but replaced the ones on the rounded points with raised and chamfered circles. This created a stronger visual harmony, as the raised shapes now matched the geometry of their base surfaces. You can compare these changes to the original design below:

After that, it was time for another print. This time, the color scheme worked much better, and the overall design of the coin was noticeably improved.