Coming Up With Ideas for Your Artwork
Creating the custom artwork for a personal set of challenge coins is probably the most exciting part of the process, apart from actually holding a finished coin in your hand. Ideas and inspirations for the designs come from all sorts of different places, and no two customers ever create the same coin.
But coming up with a design can sometimes be tricky if you are not sure where to start. Our artists are happy to make something completely original from scratch with something as simple as a bullet list of items, but to really get the most out of the experience, it helps to have some solid ideas prepared.
Some of our corporate customers have artwork preapproved before contacting us, while other customers send us sketches of their ideas scribbled on the back of a napkin or on a whiteboard. But one of the best ways to give our artists an idea of what you need is to send us some graphics or images that you like, and we can alter and combine them however you need to make the perfect design.
The Finding Inspiration Clipart and Digital Photos
A few great places to get started when looking for designs or stock photos are websites like Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, Flickr or other image websites. There are filters you can use to refine your search and there are all kinds of authentic looking designs, pictures and artwork to choose from. Categories range from wildlife to space tech and everything in between.
Once you have some inspirational images, all you need to do is send our team a quick outline of your idea (a bullet list works fine) and upload the stock images you want our artists to work from. If you have some experience with photo editing software, you can even splice together a rough sketch of the coins you are looking for, but this is by no means required. Our artists have years of experience and training and are perfectly capable of creating memorable designs with just a little bit of guidance from the customer!
These photos were sent in by a member of the Firstmark Credit Union in San Antonio, Texas. Firstmark Credit Union was named one of the "2020 Best Places to Work" by the San Antonio Business journal. To commemorate this recognition, they created a challenge coin to award their employees in gratitude. They wanted a design that incorporated their company logo, and the "2020 Best Places to Work" logo with edge engraving.
We have a design template that you are free to download and scribble your ideas on as well. When it comes to including stock artwork, don’t feel like you need to find a way to add the artwork directly to the template. Just write down instructions on where you want to see certain things and our artists will run with it from there. There are also places for choosing what size, metal plating, edging and all sorts of other custom options you want to see on your coins when using the template.
If our artists have any recommendations for options they think would work best on your design, like plating or edging, we will include multiple proofs so you can see the differences. From there, all you need to do is decide which ones work best and let our team know what revisions you need to make them perfect.
Getting The Perfect Design
When it comes time to choose a specific style of challenge coin, it all depends on how you want elements of the stock designs you supplied included in the final coin. We have three main styles of challenge coins: 2D, 3D and offset print.
if you want to include an actual photograph image on one or both sides of your coins, offset printing is the best way to go. Both 2D and 3D challenge coins offer different ways for showing off depth, detail and colorful artwork in full metal relief. We can send proofs of all three different styles so you can get an idea of how they look, but if you already know what style of coin you need, just let us know, and we will make it happen.
Making any kind of custom design with our Signature Coins team is easy. Our art team is staffed with experienced creative minds who spend their days drawing up brand new designs for our clients and helping them make the best choices for implementing that design on a custom coin. Whether you have a coin design idea based on stock artwork or you are have something prepared and ready to go as soon as you contact us, you can bet our team has everything you need to make a beautiful challenge coin.
