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For the development of my Braille greetings cards, I wanted to go with a minimal approach. I began thinking about the best way to combine the message for people who could see, and those who couldn't. I considered placing the text at a large scale, overlapping with the braille as shown below. Although I liked some of the combination on-screen, I had a feeling it would not have worked so effectively once the braille had been embossed. For this reason, I also experimented with using the braille on its own to see how effective the outcome was.
Experimenting with opacities with and without text translations. The green braille dot experiments were taken directly from my Studio Brief one braille publication. At this point in time the colour was not used for any particular reason.
I wanted the braille dots to be as defined as possible. I thought about a range of ways I could achieve this. I considered using nuts or lentils as they were the right width and would be easy to glue to the paper. However I knew this would not be practical over time as the food would eventually rot or disintegrate.
It was recommended to me that I tried sourcing some raised rounded stickers to achieve the braille effect. I searched in all of the craft shops I could think of including a visit to the large Hobbycraft but was sadly unsuccessful. Something I did come across was a packet of stick on eyes. These happened to be the perfect height of what I was looking for. Their raised dome effect would have worked as great defined braille effect.
I bought a packet of the stick on eyes as experimentation. This also meant I could see how the eyes worked as braille. I thought using the eyes as braille could be appropriate to the purpose of these cards - partially impaired people see through the feel of the braille.. in this case they touch the eyes to see the message. I was reluctant to follow through with this idea however, as I was aware it could have been seen as distasteful and offensive. I wanted these cards to appeal to a broad audience and set a good example, therefore I thought the stick on eyes were slightly risky. After running the idea past a few people, it was agreed that although the concept was clever and interesting, it may be taken the wrong way in a real-life situation.
As another alternative experiment, I tried painting the stick on eyes to see how effective this was. This was unsuccessful due to the paint not drying over the plastic eyes. I also tried painting over the lentils, but they looked jagged and uneven so I was steered away from that idea too.
Eventually, I decided to follow on from my previous methods used in my braille publication. I cut the braille dots out of watercolour paper using a hole punch. Each braille dot was then placed individually onto the front each card. I did this by referring to my own research publication. It was a really easy way to ensure the letters, spacing and punctuation were all correct. The braille dots were glued onto the front of the cards using a strong super glue.
I used the hole punch as a paperweight to keep the cards securely in place.
When each card was finished it was folded and left to dry.
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