I’ve had the link to Ponoko in my email for a little over a month, but haven’t really taken the time to explore it…until yesterday.  Then, of course, it sucked up a good 4 hours while I tooled around the site poking into its utilities, how-to guides and - most fun! - what other users have created with it.

For those of you who live in the world of design every day or professionally, it may not seem so remarkable, but for the layman it offers streamlined access to 3-D/vectoring tools, specific instructions for their use, and the manufacturer to make them come to life.  Basically, you create a design to be laser-cut out of sheet metal, bamboo, acrylic or one of their other materials, save it as an eps file, and upload it to them.  They will manufacture your item(s) and ship it back in an incredibly short amount of time.

In the “pro” column: they’ve made it simple enough for nearly anyone to walk through - especially with the help of their ‘how-to’ guides.  Closer to a “con”:  shipping costs are steep, since the items come from NZ, but if you get enough items cut, the each cost spreads that out.  It’s certainly not unreasonable, just a little sticker-shock for people who don’t ship internationally much.

Other features include:  a forum to troubleshoot or share ideas, the ability to have a designer work up the specs for you, or even to create the design from your idea/description only, available designs for you to modify your way, a personal showroom you can set up to sell directly from their site, an app for sharing info to social networking sites or blogs, you can even upgrade from the free account to the Prime and that includes them repping your products to retail outlets!

Wood & styrene lamp by Sherman Warren

I’m in love with some of the lighting designs that folks have come up with, and given the variety of materials available (they just added industrial felt) there are scads of other ways to take it.  Jewelry is popular, as are kid’s toys. There’s furniture, vases, laptop stands, magazine racks, games and puzzles, wine racks - even an iPhone document scanner made out of cardboard!  The options are limited only by the template size, really, so the trick is figuring out what to make first.

Oh yes - click on the blog link to read about Wired’s experience with Ponoko, and keep scrolling to geek out on ATYPYK’s fun and clever designs.