How to Spell with… Pistons.

If you’ve met the Spelling Animals before you will not be surprised to find me occasionally spelling words with slightly inappropriate objects: cats, chickens, octopi and so on. But this may be my most unusual spelling commission to date. Done for my brother as a gift to give to the people from Carbodeon Ltd Oy, a Finnish company specializing in nanomaterials, specifically very, very tiny diamonds.

I shan’t go on about the thermal conductivity and functional groups of these things: I spent a day at Birmingham NEC at a trade fair for Advanced Materials and can talk quite convincingly on the subject now, and I was never less than nerdy to start with. But I don’t need to because the properties of these nanodiamonds are already summed up by the wonderful tagline: “Hard as Hell, But Cooler” (my brother’s words, not mine).

Suffice it to say that the picture needed to combine some finely engineered mechanical things, and electronics. Hence: spelling with pistons.

Hard as Hell, but Cooler: spelling for Carbodeon

Hard as Hell sketch

A little close-up: pistons and stuff

A little close-up: electronics bits