Finished a wooden Uno reverse card as a gag gift and learned a couple things

I did an inlay sign for my sister's kitchen last fall, walnut background with maple lettering, and the seams got me too. What worked in the end was cheating the design a bit. I nudged the letter shapes outward in the software so they pressed into the pockets tight, then sanded everything back flush. Still needed a couple rounds of gap filling with sanding dust and glue around the curves, but way better than my first attempt where every piece sat loose like yours did around that oval. The backing layer trick is real. Mine was 1/8 birch ply and it kept the whole face flat while the glue cured, plus it gave me something to clamp against without denting the veneer. The tape-only method left me with two warped spots I had to steam out.

For leveling the surface, I gave up on sandpaper partway through and picked up a card scraper. It shaves the maple down level with the walnut without chewing into the softer grain, and no dust clogging up the pores. Took maybe twenty minutes after a frustrating hour with 220 grit.

The wipe-on poly is a good call too. After four coats the grain contrast between the two woods really pops under the light, and for a joke gift that's supposed to hang on a wall, it'll hold up fine to fingerprints.

Funny timing, I made one of these for my cousin's forty-fifth after he kept slapping the card down on me during our monthly board game nights. I went a completely different route with the build though. Instead of inlaying anything I just engraved the whole face into a single piece of 6mm Baltic birch and flooded the recesses with black-tinted epoxy. Sanded back flush after it cured and honestly it reads just as bold, way less fiddly than gluing dozens of little letters down. The epoxy does darken the wood around the edges a bit, so I masked the whole face first and that helped a lot.

The background came out of a scrap bin, some birch ply I had left from a shelf build, and I hit it with Watco danish oil instead of poly since I figured a joke sign didn't need armor. Two years on the wall of his den and it's holding up fine, maybe a slightly scuffed corner where the vacuum keeps smacking it. On the letter question, I actually tried raised lettering on a name sign for my kid's door before this one and regretted it immediatly. At that small a scale the letters are too fragile, snapped two of the a's cleaning them off the bed. Flat all the way for anything under about an inch tall.

Joined this forum last week mostly to lurk and this thread alredy taught me somethig. I tried a marquity style name plaque for my daughter's door over the summer and every corner came out gappy, never realized the beam itself takes a bite out of the fit. So when you compensate for that, do you just tell the software to shrink the pockets a hair and fatten the inserts, or is it diferent for each part? Also curious how thin your veneers were, mine was about 1/16 maple and it kept scorching on the edges before it cut clean through.

Purpleheart was a bold pick for the border. I used a little of it on a chessboard frame once and the sawdust turned everything purple for a week, plus it blunts sandpaper crazy fast. What saved me on that project was switching to a cabinet scraper for the final leveling, sounds odd but it slices that dense grain clean instead of polishing it shiny while the softer wood around it disappears.

This reminds me of doing veneer work by hand back in the day, cutting pockets with a knife and fitting each piece by feel before lasers were even a twinkle. We used hot hide glue and a hammer veneering setup, and the nice part was you could pop a loose piece back off with a hot iron and re-glue it. That popped letter of yours would've been a two minute fix with the old method instead of a headache. Hide glue also takes finish fine if you wipe the squeeze-out before it dries.