Skyline Ornament

Minneapolis Sunset Skyline Ornament

When I was first accepted to be a vendor at the Meet Minneapolis Visitor Center in January 2025, I immediately began brainstorming ideas for items that I could sell there. I knew right away that I wanted to make some variation of the skyline shadow box I have made previously. I figured an ornament was a good fit to house this design and I was very much pulling from my experience of when I made this ornament in 2023.

I did SO much planning in my head for this project before I even got started. I had a lot of things to consider about the colors I wanted to use, how to get the building layers to all fit, and how to attach a hook at the top. It took me a few days to mentally plan and then once I started actually designing it, this ornament took me a month to finish.

This is my workspace in Adobe Illustrator for creating the design for this ornament. I decided to have the skyline be from the West looking towards the East because it seems like a lot of the buildings get progressively taller from this angle. I also wanted to include buildings like City Hall and US Bank Stadium, which would be hidden had I chosen a different angle. The angle I used in this skyline design was a Western view, if you're curious.

From here, I used a lot of Google Maps to plan what buildings I needed to include and to take pictures of the buildings I needed. I labeled all of the buildings I included for my own sake, so that I could better tell them apart. I also decided what layer I wanted them to be included in. I decided to do five layers-- this felt like enough to get a really nice depth to the building, but not too many that the layers lacked significant buildings. I also chose 5 layers because it made the most sense with the colors I wanted to use.

You may notice a few things here. One, is the issue of scale. I had to use scale a little bit to inform the positioning of some of the buildings because though one building may be directly behind another, from the vantage point I chose, it should, in reality, appear next to it. I used scale as a starting point to understand where to place the buildings and then made minor, design informed descisions to move some of the buildings for visibility's sake. This is also true for the buildigns in the back. I moved the back layers up in space a little bit so that they can be better seen behind the foreground buildings.

Once I had the buildings drawn, I moved the files into a new Illustrator document and I created all of the layers for the ornament.

I then imported these layers into Bambu Studio and created a 3D model.

I had to do a LOT of testing for this design. I couldn't quite figure out how to get the different layers to stay in place within the ornament. These are a few of the prototypes I made. As you can see on the blue piece on the bottom, I also had to figure out how to put spacers between the layers because I wanted there to be more demention to the layers.

I also immediately had top layer issues with this design. It was a top priority for me that this top layer look nice and sleek, so I dedicated a lot of time to fixing this issue.

To fix the top layer, I messed around with the angle of the print to find what looked best.

I also printed out MANY different ironing tests to see what made the surface look best.

This was my first, completely finished prototype. I wanted to test out the ornament using test colors before I used the nice, colorful filament.

This is what the back of the finalized ornament looks like.

This is a tag I made that I include with every ornament. I think that people are interested to know which buildings are which on the ornament, at least the most important ones. I think it is a fun addition that the Visitor Center customers can enjoy.

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