Class Letter

Oct 2018, Oct 2019, Oct 2021

This class letter was created as part of a competition during my school spirit week in high school. The name of my high school was Mohawk. Since there are 6 letters in Mohawk, and 6 grades at my school (7th-12th), each grade was assigned to build a certain letter, so that they would spell out "MOHAWK" when placed together. Seniors built the M, Juniors the O, so on and so forth with 7th grade building the K. I designed the letters for my class in 9th, 10th, and 12th grade (11th skipped due to covid). Letter's had to be 4' tall, display the school colors (blue and gold), and build in some creative bells and whistles. My class won the letter competition by a landslide all 3 years thanks to a simple but well executed design that won the judges over.

Project Walkthrough

Look through the images and descriptions below to see how this project came to life!

Planning

In order to determine the dimensions for the overall letter, I looked up a "Varsity M" online and printed it out. I then measured the length of all the sides on paper using millimeters to be accurate as possible. I then set the height of the letter (in mm) equal to 4 feet and used this ratio to proportionally scale all the other dimensions of the letter. The drawing on the left shows the final drawing to scale which was used to cut out the full sized letter my senior year.

Cutting Out The Letter

Using the drawing above, I was able to send the dimensions to another one of my classmates who cut the letter out in their garage. The final cutout is shown to the right. The dimensions scaled up great in real life to create a nice looking "M" without any guesswork!

Adding Paint

With the letter cut out, the next step was to add paint! We chose an outdoor rated acrylic paint to ensure that the letter would hold up to the elements when being displayed at sports games during spirit week.

Finishing Touches

With the paint added, the last step was to add some creative elements which would amaze the judges. We decided to add some glitter to the wet paint for a little sparkle, along with a border of animated LEDs that could be set to different flashing patterns. I measured the length of the border and the total number of LEDs to ensure they were evenly spaced around the border. The "M" shown on the right won my class first place for the 3rd year in a row!

Project Gallery

Explore the photos below to see some of the letters made in previous years!