As I get deep into my 40’s I am appreciating being able to hold things in my hand more and having that same thing not shining bright lights into my eyeballs. For the past few years I have been in 3D printing, even uploading some videos and tutorials on it, but recently I bought an (regular) printer. Nothing special, the Epson ET-2800 which uses refillable ink bottles, including ones you can buy off-brand. I really wanted this because I hated the cartridges of yore and as a result ink is really cheap. It prints really really well, especially on the proper photo paper. It can print 8×10 with borders or 4×6 or smaller borderless. Anyway I digress.
Printing up all these photos made me want to present them a bit cleaner than in just a stack of photos, or photo album. If you go on Amazon frames are expensive. You are spending at least $10 a frame for questionable quality. I knew 3D printing could help. A frame at the end of the day is just a rectangle with another rectangle holding the photo in, but I a few design goals I wanted to hit.
Design Goals
- Easy to print – While my printers are well tuned I don’t want to have to worry about prints failing.
- Low filament usage – Melting plastic costs money and time, can I design something that uses a small amount of material, especially if tariffs drive the cost up.
- Includes a glass (or plexi-glass) window. A photo in a frame without glass looks warped, gets broken down by the environment and looks generally unprofessional.
- Can stick to the wall – Even though I own a house I don’t want a bunch of holes in it, so I wanted a design that I can just stick to the wall using some of this Gorilla Mounting Putty and take off and move around if I get bored of the photo or layout.
- Needs to look good – There are some very gaudy frames out there, both ones you can buy or 3d print. I wanted to use a more minimalist timeless design to highlight the photo itself so I took inspiration from my recent trip to the International Center of Photography in designing my frame.
Design Process
I am a very junior 3d modeler and think of design from a bit of a programatic lens (pun intended), so I use a program call OnShape. It’s parametric, which is a fancy way of saying everything is mathmatic based and can be adjusted. This means I can rapid prototype different designs and fitments easily. Printing, modifying, adjusting till I get the perfect frame.
Through a bunch of trial and error I got to a V1 version.
It’s not perfect. The X works pretty good but it doesn’t feel good putting together and you have to do some bending. It works but didn’t work great.
I continued to model and tried and rejected magnetic attachment, slide in and a few other approaches before finally settling on something that snaps together. It has a real nice balance of feeling solid and secure while being easy enough to separate and to replace the photo. The magnetic approach could have done it without taking it off the wall, but felt a bit too weak.
Mounting is where you get to have some fun. The joy of 3d printing is I have so many different fun colors that I can match a color to a dominant color in the photo, or pick something contrasting, or just use black. I can balance having a frame out of the way, with also bringing you into the photo. It makes for a bit of joy combining a print of a PHOTO and a print of a FRAME.
I could potentially see myself selling this as a service. A customer would send me a collection of digital files and I would both print the photos, and either take direction on colors from the customer or pick my own and deliver back framed photos to them.
I could see a few additional products as well:
- Photo “trading cards” small photos mounted without glass that can be used like playing cards. Like a modern polaroid.
- Different frame designs and sizes
- QR codes on the photo frame or back that link to a story or a gallery of that moment. For example the frame photo of that aspen tree linking to a webpage with a gallery or blog post of that hike.
Is this something worth exploring? Is this something people are willing to pay for in this time of instant gratification from Amazon, iPhoto, etc?