Tiny Text - Sizing Text for Engraving

Sometimes when designing things digitally, it’s easy to forget that we might be designing things that are really tiny. We can easily zoom in and out while working in CAD programs and suddenly we’re making something that is 2mm by 2mm.

The design component that most often gets too small is text! We typically recommend that the smallest that you go with most text is 12pt font. Anything smaller than this becomes tricky to read once engraved. To make things a little more visual, we’ve engraved a few samples on bamboo plywood, clear acrylic and birch plywood.

Laser Cut Text on Bamboo Plywood
Laser Cut Clear Acrylic Engraving
Laser Cut Birch Plywood engraved or etched with Text

You can see that small text size becomes illegible when working too small and sometimes the engrave can become inconsistent.

If you’ve already outlined your text (one of the things you do to prepare your file for laser cutting…don’t worry, we’re doing a tutorial on this soon), you might be unsure of what size your font is. Typically you don’t want the font to be any smaller than .08 - .11” in height.


If you have any questions about text size, feel free to send us an email!

DESIGN, FILE PREPRebecca HewittACRYLIC, WOOD