In our building, there is only one male bathroom and one unisex bathroom.

The unisex bathroom is really far from the work space of most people and it is quite inconvenient for the girls. We decided to make a new unisex restroom sign for the male bathroom so that girls can also use the restroom too.

Material and Equipment:

Laser cutter

1/8" Acrylic panel for laser cutting

1/8" plywood panel for laser cutting

Acrylic paint (optional)

Step 1: Observations

If you observe the signs of the restrooms enough, you will see that the triangular symbol references a male bathroom and a round circular sign references a female bathroom.

Most of the bathrooms have the same size signs which makes it easy to make a new sign to place over it.

Step 2: Draw the Design in Illustrator

Measure the size of your sign before you draw.

Notice that the way to draw a polygon in Adobe Illustrator is to set the radius of it, which is also the distance from the center of the polygon to the vertex. Although this way makes it really easy to draw circular part of the sign, the triangular part can be tricky. Below is a formula to help in making the triangular piece.

The formula is:

[the length of the side of the triangle * 0.577 = the radius of the triangle]

The sign is constructed of 4 pieces.

Piece #1: The hollow triangle. This part will fit into the original bathroom sign later. You can print one if you use 1/4'' plywood or 2 for 1/8'' plywood. Set the radius of inner part to 7.068 in, and outer part to 7.924 in. You can set the outer part into an arbitrary number and it will be the size of the final product.

Piece #2: The round part of the sign. The radius of the circle should be the same with the outer part of the triangle in piece #2, which is 7.924 in.

Piece #3: The triangle part the sign and the outline of piece #4 in the middle. The radius of the triangle should be the same with the outer part of the triangle in piece #2, which is 7.924 in. You can choose the design you want in the middle.

Piece #4: Center Image. We decided to use a unicorn as the symbol of our unisex restroom here.

We used 1/4'' acylic for piece #4 and 1/8'' plywood for the rest.

The unicorn image is downloaded from Noun Project made by Lauren Brajczewski

(https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=unicorn&i=883...)

restroom sign.ai
Download

Step 3: Cut It Out in Laser Cutter

Make a test cut of piece #1 and see if it will fit your restroom sign before you cut everything else. Sometimes the measurement is off or there are some errors during laser cut fabrication.

Once you have confirmed it is the right size, use a laser cutter to cut the design you just made.

Step 4: Sand It

Sand the surface of the plywood to make it smoother and remove the burnt color if you want.

Step 5: Paint It

We used acrylic paint to make the circular part blue.

You can use any color you want, or you can use multiple colors!

Step 6: Put Everything Together

Put the pieces together in order by number. Piece #1 is meant to go on the back of the circle so that it can be attached to the current male door sign without any adhesive.

We attached the wooden parts together by using wood glue and used epoxy to put the acrylic panel on.