Taking an Old Coin and Making Something New
When you come to us looking for a custom coin, the process of getting your coins designed and delivered follows the same simple process as almost all of our customers. It starts with requesting artwork, and is followed by our sales team reaching out with a free quote and a free digital proof of your coins. From there, we revise the design until you’re ready to order.
It’s that simple, most of the time. But not all of our orders follow this same route. Every so often, a customer will send us a picture of an old coin and ask if we can recreate the same design for them. In these cases, we just take our tried and true ordering process and work through it in reverse. Instead of starting with a bullet list of ideas or a simple hand-drawn sketch supplied by our customers, our art team begins with a finished coin and work their way backward. This method provides certain challenges that the traditional method bypasses, but the outcome is every bit as impressive as any other set of coins we’ve created.
Reverse Engineering the Virginia Gardens Coin Design
One of the most recent examples of this type of project came from Chief Ray Hernandez of the Virginia Gardens Police Department. The coin he wanted to recreate was over 10 years old. If he’d ordered the original from us, we would have been able to look up the order and all would be said and done. But since the original coin was made by another custom coin maker, we needed our production team to take a closer look at the design.
With years of experience handcrafting custom challenge coins of all different shapes and sizes, there’s no one better able to break down the finer points of a coin’s construction than our production team. Once our sales team saw pictures of the coin sent in by Hernandez, they knew the most important features to get right were the hard enamel colorfills and the silkscreen emblems on either side of the coin.
The reason we knew that the hard enamel and the silkscreen portions of the design were the most important to get right was because we had no idea if the coin was actually using hard enamel or silkscreen just by looking at a photo. There are a few different ways that the coins could have been made, and if we’d simply guessed and used the wrong options to create the coins, they would end up looking and feeling different than the original.
So, we asked Hernandez to send us a physical sample to look over. Once the sample arrived in our office, our sales team repackaged it and sent it to our production facility so they could determine the best way to remake the design with perfect accuracy.
Knowing the Difference in Custom Options
With only pictures to work with, our production team was not sure if the blue enamel throughout the design was soft or hard enamel. Soft enamel coins have raised and recessed layers, while a hard enamel coin has a smooth surface. Adding epoxy over a soft enamel design will create a similar type of smooth surface as hard enamel, but with a slightly different appearance and texture.
After holding the original coin Chief Hernandez sent in, it was easy to see that the coin had hard enamel along the edge and inside the emblem on the reverse side of the coin. The silver backdrop on either side of the coin didn’t use any enamel colorfill. Instead, the recessed silver plating was sandblasted to add a special texture to the metal that reduces glare.
As for the minuscule emblem at the bottom of the gold police badge and the second emblem on the back of the coin, there are only two ways to create that kind of artwork on a coin: Silk screen and offset printing. Offset printed challenge coins have custom photographs sealed into the coin face with a protective layer of epoxy added over them. We recommend offset printing for designs featuring a person’s face or very small, highly detailed images.
Hernandez’s coin uses silk screen instead of offset printing. Silk screen is a technique that involves adding paint directly to a coin using a custom stencil. The colors are added in layers, and the silkscreen stencil prevents the paint from leaking onto other parts of the coin or bleeding together.
These types of differences are subtle enough that a picture isn’t enough to tell them apart. Making sure our production team had the original coin to reference when making the new design made sure that the design we made was an exact match to the original, recreating the texture of the coins as well as the appearance.
Here at Signature Coins, We’re Committed to Getting Things Right
At the end of the day, it would have been really easy, and even a little quicker, to take a look at the photos Chief Hernandez sent over and set to work creating our own version of the design. Odds are that it would have been very similar to the original, but describing one of our products as “close enough” is not an option for our team. We’re committed to our customers and the quality of our products. If we’d chosen soft enamel when the original coin was hard enamel or offset printing instead of silk screen, the coins would have been passable, but nothing like the original. Instead of guessing or experimenting with different types of designs, we reverse-engineered the original coin and made a product as true to the original as possible.
If you and your team need to recreate an old challenge coin design, we’ve got you covered. Working backward from an old coin design is not an unusual request, and we’ve had years of practice. Just reach out to our sales team, let us know that the sample is on the way, and we’ll take it from there.
