Most of what we make hangs off a keyring or sticks to a fridge. This one just stands there. You type a word, pick two colours, and it prints as solid letters on a small base that holds them upright on a shelf or a desk.
How it prints without a forest of supports
Standing letters look simple and print badly if you do the obvious thing. Stand the word up the way you read it, and the printer has to lay the overhanging top of every letter onto thin air. You get support material welded to the front face, which is the one part anyone actually looks at.
So it prints lying on its back. The whole word and its base come out as one flat piece, front down on the bed, no supports. The face ends up smooth because it was pressed against the glass the entire print. You stand it up afterwards. The file we generate is already rotated for this, so whoever runs the print does not have to think about it.
Letters that sit on the base, not above it
The first version had a bug I almost wanted to keep. Type a lowercase word with a tail, like “strawberry”, and the y and the g floated over the base with a gap underneath. The fix was to drop the word onto its baseline, the invisible line type sits on, and let the descenders sink into the base the way they hang below a line of text on paper. Now the bottom of an o rests on the base and the tail of a y tucks down into it.
Two colours, one of them just for the face
You pick two colours. One is the body: the thickness of the letters, their sides, and the base they sit on. The other is a thin layer on the front, the face you read. On a printer that can swap filament mid-print, that gets you a white word with a blue edge, or any pair you like, with no painting and no stickers. Pick the same colour twice and it quietly drops the second one.
We built a twist, then shipped the plain one
There is a twisted version too, where the front face rotates against the back like a wrung cloth, so the word seems to turn as you walk past it. I like how it looks. It is also fussier to stand up, because the base has to grow wider to catch the weight that swings out past the letters. For the first product we went with the plain one, since it sits where you put it and will not tip over. The twist may come back later as its own thing.
Make one
Type a name, a date, or the word someone in the house says too often. Pick the two colours, watch it build in 3D as you type, and download the file. If you want a made-to-order product like this in your own shop, that is the kind of thing disip builds.