Archive for July, 2009
Design: Paper cutters
The paper cutter has to be toward the top of my list of favorite office supplies. Really, when I think about it, I would probably place it second behind the noble stapler. Yet my affection for the device that is an accident waiting to happen seems misplaced since I can’t say that I have had a great user experience with it.
Just the other day I was cutting out some screenshots for a design I had printed off. Maybe it’s me, but I get so annoyed trying to line up the cutting blade with whatever I am trying to cut. The grid on the cutting board surface is only usable if you know the measurements of what you’re cutting out of the top of your head. Even if I did know the measurements of one of my designs it would be in pixels rather than inches. Usually I turn to just sort of eyeing where the cut is going to fall based on the visible edge of the cutting board where the paper is not covering it. You can even typically see through the paper enough when cutting a single sheet to see the edge through the paper. Regardless, the finished cut tends to always be slightly off. I have an X-acto knife and straight edge in my cube for when precision is particularly important. This tends to be tedious, though, if you are cutting things out of multiple sheets of paper. All in all, I find any of these routes to be unsatisfactory.
Being able to make a precise straight cut is not much to ask in my opinion. That’s when I got to thinking. What if we could attach a laser to the paper cutter? As long as the light was calibrated to fall precisely where the blade was going to fall, then your cuts would be magic.
Oh yeah, you probably don’t want that laser shooting off into space; but it made for a more fun picture.