The following design goals were decided at the beginning of the project and guided us throughout our design process.



Precise, robust, fast system

​Because calligraphy requires very fine, smooth motions, our physical machine needed to be able to move very precisely and reliably. We did, however, need to balance precision and speed, as we wanted the machine to write as close as possible to the speed that a human would, so as to produce proper strokes.



Produce strokes resembling hand-written calligraphy

​Writing proper calligraphy (as opposed to simple printing) requires motion in three axes. First, it must be able to move in the horizontal plane to outline words. On top of that, it must be able to produce variable pressure. Hand-written calligraphy relies on the pressure of the pen on the page to produce strokes of different thicknesses (as the nib of the pen splits and widens the flow of ink). We needed to not only pick the pen up off the page but also vary how hard the pen pressed into the paper. This required us to create a three-axis gantry with smooth, minute motions in each axis.



Aesthetically pleasing

​We wanted our final product, from GUI to physical machine, to be aesthetically pleasing as well as functional so that the final product would look as professional as possible.



Quick turnaround rate

​To optimize the user's experience, we wanted to minimize the time between the user giving input through the GUI and the machine writing text.



Intuitive, powerful user interface

We wanted the interface to be intuitive for non-technical users by allowing them to input text using our GUI. We did not, however, want to sacrifice powerful functionality. We therefore decided to make it possible for more experienced users to input their own, non-text files.