CO2 engraving

A laser does not add anything. It removes a thin layer of the surface, and what you see afterwards is the material itself — wood scorched a shade darker, glass frosted opaque, slate revealed lighter beneath its surface. Whatever colour was in your file is irrelevant to the result; only the shape matters.

So the artwork that engraves best is a shape, not a picture. Build the design as solid black on a transparent background: the black areas are engraved, the transparent ones are left as bare material. That gives you exact control over the outcome, because the file becomes a straightforward map of engraved and unengraved.

The colour options on an engraved product are materials and finishes, not print colours. Choosing walnut over bamboo changes what the whole piece looks like; it does not change the colour of your design, because your design has no colour of its own.

Wood and bamboo take an engraving warmly — the mark is a darker, slightly scorched tone against the grain, and the grain itself remains visible through and around the design. Slate gives high contrast, a pale mark against a dark ground.

Glass behaves differently and is worth understanding before you commit a design to it. The laser frosts the surface, and frosting is essentially all-or-nothing: an area is either etched or it is not, with no in-between. That makes glass the highest-contrast option and also the least forgiving of intricacy — bolder lines and simpler shapes are noticeably sharper on glass than fine detail is.

Glass also conducts heat poorly, so engraving can create tiny micro-fractures within the design, and the density of the glass itself varies slightly even within a single piece. Both produce small variations from item to item. These are inherent to engraving a hard, brittle surface, not defects, and they are part of why no two engraved glass pieces are quite identical.

Supply a PNG or an SVG. Use real transparency for everything you do not want engraved — a white background is not the same as a transparent one, and on some setups white is treated as artwork rather than as absence.

If you are working in SVG and your design contains text, convert the text to outlines before saving. An un-outlined font relies on that exact font being installed wherever the file is opened, and if it is not, the text is silently substituted with a default face.

Avoid semi-transparent elements, soft shadows and glows. They have no engraved equivalent — each one resolves to either engraved or not — so it is far better to make that decision yourself in the artwork than to leave it to a threshold.