UT Austin Coasters

Background

Many months prior to this project, I had finished a batch of two dozen Union Coasters to gift to all of my Wisconsinite family. However, my own graduation was coming up, and I was looking for a fun gift for all the friends I had made in undergrad. After the positive reception of the UW Madison variant, I tried my hand at making some coasters for UT Austin.

Unfortunately, inspiration did not strike me quite the same with UT. What was our “symbol”? Was there something totally recognizable to any alum, inspiring fond memories of their time in school? Perhaps the famous UT tower or Bevo. I settled on two icons: the Longhorns logo and the university seal.

Design and Fabrication

I took a lot of lessons from the Union coaster set I had previously done, and followed a similar procedure. I found a round seal for the University of Texas at Austin, using the correct font and spacing. Using GIMP, I replaced the old variant of the UT seal with the selected icons: the UT Longhorn and modern university seal.

The construction was also the same process as used for the UW Union variant. Each was constructed of three layers, with the center layer housing the colored felt that is visible from the top. In this design, the top face used a combination of both rastering and vectoring laser techniques, such that some of the design was cut through the wood and part was simply etched into the wood.

After the cuts and rasters, it was a straight assembly line of sanding, staining, gluing, and finishing. The whole process was even faster, considering that I had finished a few dozen like this just earlier in the summer.

Conclusion

I still use one of these on my desk to this very day, and I am generally pleased with how they turned out. If I were to be slightly critical of the design, I would say that the rasters did not stain as evenly as I would have hoped for these coasters. On the close-up, you can see the stain looks streaky and uneven, although the finished products look better than they photograph.

Since they were made out of ply wood, the material under the surface layers was much more porous and did not sand as evenly. Ultimately, I think this design might have been better executed with solid wood, although that may have brought its own challenges.

Perhaps a designer more experienced than I can help me articulate it, but the UT variant seems to be somehow both more cluttered and lacking at once. I have a lot of appreciation for the simplicity, scalability, and effectiveness of the UW Madison union chair design. It is obvious how it has earned its icon status.