Tips for Creating Great Challenge Coins

Our graphics department is the core of what we do – designing and manufacturing great looking coins. We try our very best to get your coin design back to you as fast as possible. There are some things you can do to prepare our graphics staff so that your design shows up even quicker. Think of this as the foundation of your home, if the foundation is shaky It doesn’t matter how awesome the house is, sooner or later its going to fail. The same can be said about artwork and challenge coins. If your artwork is junk and then your coin 9 out of 10 times is going to be junk as well.

Images: Click GO CUSTOM and upload up to four images; one for the front of your coin, and one for the back. Try to make sure you send us the largest possible images so that we may extract the most detail from the image into your challenge coin design. If you have your artwork pre-drawn in vector or PDF format, this will greatly speed up the process. Extremely complicated challenge coins sometimes take up to 5 hours to compose (especially those with 3D requests). Vector artwork will drastically reduce this time.

3D: Many customers wish to have one or more elements of their custom coins manufactured using a 3D process. For this to be most successful, your image must be high resolution. Our 3D technique is unique to us – no other company renders 3D coins like we do, and while the process is very time consuming on our end, the end result is fantastic.

Worth The Wait: An average design submitted to us for proofing takes about 2.5 hours of work from our graphics department. A challenge coin with 3D included takes up to 4 or more hours. With the amount of requests we receive every day from customers, we may not be the fastest to get your custom design back, but we are willing to bet our artwork is superior. If you are in a rush, please indicate this on your request submission, or give us a call, and we can prioritize your project accordingly. You may want to read “How to design Challenge coins” for even more information.

Bigger Really Can Be Better: If you are looking to get the absolute most detail possible into your coin, consider some of the larger sizes. We are often asked to cram an enormous amount of detail into a 1.50” coin. Although we usually come up with a solution by simplifying certain details, in the end most customers are much more satisfied if the coin has ALL of what they wanted to see. There are times when a coin has so many detailed “parts” to it, that a larger coin is warranted. For example, military ratings combined with one or more 3D images and/or seals with small wording. If in doubt, you can leave it up to us and we will make your custom coin artwork at the smallest possible size to accurately fit your wishes.

Options and Delivery: Need your coins fast? Here are a few examples of options that will slow the delivery of your coins: epoxy, silk screening, edge engraving or numbering, complicated color schemes, dual plating, specialty edging, hard enamel challenge coins and offset printed images.

As an illustration, the challenge coin on the left will deliver much quicker than the coin on the right. This is due to the many colors and small spaces on the right hand coin that must be hand filled at our factory.

Making custom quality challenge coins and Military belt buckles are one of our specialties. If you’re interested in getting a designing a custom buckle or Quality Challenge coin for your Division, Command, or Mess we’ve streamlined the process, click the get started link at the bottom of the page and someone from our design team will be with you within 48 hours to bring your vision to life. If your interested in making something awesome in metal, so hot you need glove to put it on your belt check out Pitch and Rudders Custom Military Belt Buckles.