Card Case

The Card Case is a small box with a loose lid for four memory cards and a card reader. Memory cards are small, expensive and suspiciously good at vanishing. The question was whether a box for them could have some character, and not be one more black block.

The design. The case has two parts: a tray and a lid. The tray is 71 mm wide, 93 mm long and 30 mm high, with faceted walls. The lowest 9.4 mm is Ivory White and the rest Charcoal, with a red line of 0.6 mm between them that follows the facets. Inside are four narrow slots for the cards and one wide compartment for the reader. The lid is 4.2 mm thick and carries three kinds of inlay: a white outline that stands 0.6 mm proud, a white triangular field with a red edge, and four small windows showing green, as many as there are card slots.

What makes it hard. Four colours in one part is the printer's limit, and the lid uses all four in a little over 4 mm of height. The green sits in three layers, but the red and the white run through almost the full thickness. So nearly every layer of the lid holds more than one colour, and each change costs time and a little purged filament. Gram for gram, that makes the lid the most expensive part of the case. The tray does the opposite: white, red and charcoal are level bands, which comes to two changes over 30 mm of height. Same palette, very different bill.

Where it stands. This is version nine of the design. The lid rests on a ledge 26.2 mm up inside the tray. How easily it drops in and comes out again is for a print to confirm, and no print report exists yet. The images are renders, and the cards in them are props.

It shows what you can ask for: a case sized to what goes in it, with a logo or a mark in colour. If you would like something similar, ask for a quote.