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Military Influencers Conference 2018

October 1, 2018 By PNR Leave a Comment

VETERAN BUSINESS OWNERS AND THEIR CHALLENGE COINS

Designing Challenge Coins is always a pleasure; however, when you get to develop something for your own community, a group of kickass veteran business owners it opens up so much more joy! To say that we were excited when Justin Szerletich of Szerds, reached out to Pitch and Rudder, to design the challenge coin is an understatement! We knew that this coin would be handed out to every veteran and spouse attending the convention and we wanted to make sure that it left a lasting impression. Making a Custom Challenge coins for Veteran Business Owners spanning all the different branches of service, it was important that we made it either very general or included all the different branches of service. Like with most designs and contracts that we work, we did both.

GETTING THE RIGHT FLOW

As we began the process of brainstorming, really hammering out what would be cost effective for the client and still make an immediate impact in the swag bags we came up a very clever idea that we had done in the past. QRC technology is not new by any means, but its normally found on coins. We recently had completed a coin for a Chiefs mess SRT-2 in which we had utilized a QRC code to link back from their coin to a secret Facebook group. The Coin was a huge hit, so on the table, we put Linking Conference Influencers presentations to the coins by a laser QRC. The initial design looked like this:

Now, this was with keeping all the branches of service on the coin. The square in the middle would have been raised up and held the QRC code for the presentations. As we continued to progress on the design we moved away from the QRC code but kept at this time the branches of service. Our second rendering looked like this:

We started working on a revolver feel on the back of the coin, we removed the flag background and put it into on the chambers and added the branched around. We removed the QRC code and inserted our logo, as a guide rod holder. At this point, we were contemplating, should we make the backspin like a regular revolver. We thought it would be a very cool feature of the coin, basically, you never know which chamber you’re going to get when you start messing with a bunch of kickass veteran business owners! We moved away from this design because we were asked to incorporate the sponsors of the event into the back of the coin and in a revolver setting we would not be able to do each one justice.

FINAL DESIGN

Once we went back to the drawing board for the third time developing the final product wasn’t that hard. We set out all the sponsors vectored logos on a sheet and arranged them as a team. Looking at the logos how they fit together like a puzzle and using the branding manual, the final design kind of developed itself. Now came the coloring aspect. We wanted to make sure that everything was as seamless as possible, we offered 18 color combinations for the final product. To include these:

Once, we had all the images build up and the designs settled on; we created 3 samples in silver. White, Black, and Navy Blue.

Conference Leadership decided to go with the white coins and we pushed headstrong into production. Giving us our final product as:

Collaboration with other Veteran Business Owners are awesome, they help everyone build better networking infostructures and communities. We really enjoyed working with Justin at Szerds and are looking forward to many more events. Justin’s company tailors executive gifts for events and companies looking to find veteran made merchandise that has been vetted for quality. His catalog has 33 vendors, covering a gambit of swag from tier one merch to tier three, he can meet any and all your needs! On top of Szerds, he is a Biztalk radio host in the San Diego area, Justin has his hands in everything, so if you need it chances are he can find it. The 2018 Military Influencers Conference Custom Challenge coin is available for sale in our shop and can be purchased with the optional gift box or in the standard PVC sleeve. If you’re interested in Purchasing a Coin please follow the link here.

VETERAN BUSINESS OWNERS #GOCUSTOM

Making Custom Challenge Coins is always awesome, it truly is a labor of love! Working with Veteran Business Owners makes it even better, sitting down and video conferencing as we go over your design ideas, importing you into our Project management software so you can track your custom coins progress is inspiring! We work every day to make it easier for you to #GOCUSTOM, Click the link on the bottom of the page, tell us what you’re looking for and upload a few images! Let us work our magic and bring your imagination to life, or scratch something on a barroom napkin, send us a snapshot of it and see how badass our designers really are! One of the coolest coins we’ve designed so far came to us on a napkin from a husband making something special for his retiring wife. Whatever the case, just know we make it easy to #GOCUSTOM!

Space Force One

September 3, 2018 By PNR Leave a Comment

Our Collaboration With Salty Soldier

The project was pretty straight forward, take the Space Force t-shirt designs from the The Salty Soldier and turn it into a truly tricked out Space Force Challenge Coin. Anyone worth their salt in this game, understands the dynamic difference between designing something for a Custom Shirt and designing something for a Custom Challenge Coin. Understanding the fundamental design differences is why at Pitch and Rudder we have a department dedicated to designing just Custom Shirts. From the gate on this project we wanted to make sure we were looking at all the right angles; therefore we brought both our Custom T-shirt Department and Challenge Coin team on Zoom to hash out the details.

The Original Design

The shirt was designed for Direct to Garment, meaning the Salty Soldier didn’t have worry too about 1/2 tones or color restrictions as you would with Screen Printing. The gradients for the metal where rich and clean! The Vector files for the front, just required the 3D aspect to be assigned and the face to be polished up for metal work. All in all a 25 min Zoom conference was all it took to streamline the front for production!

Space Force Challenge Coin Design

With the front sorted out the Challenge Coin team took to designing the back. We employ five designers here at Pitch and Rudder and this project as a battle to see who could complete it first. Normally, we will just assign a designer and move on; however, every designer we have on the books wanted a crack at designing the back of this coin! When the dust settled, we decided to use pieces from each of the designers input in making the back of coin, it was just too cool of a project not to be apart of!

Space Force One

When all the pieces came together the coin came out amazing! We added those little touches that really set off the piece and as one of the first Space Force challenge coins to market, it hit all the right marks. It was creative, well thought out and not rushed. The Glitter on the back of the coin mixed in with the black paint really puts the image of space to mind while the two alien space crafts round out the mission! Say what you will about making a fifth branch of the service, but Space Force is funded and there’s probably a reason why…. But I wouldn’t worry too much, our forces are going to be HUGE!

Now our Trump Coins are expected to arrive in the next 2 weeks, we have them listed in the store for pre-sale Here If your interested! I have to say it was a blast working with James and Forrest at The Salty Soldier, I don’t expect this to be our last collaboration!

If your looking to Go Custom, Hit the link on the bottom and lets make our next post about your Rock Star project!

Puzzle Challenge Coin, Season of Pride!

January 15, 2018 By PNR Leave a Comment

The Concept

When we look back over all the projects that we have completed over the last two years, there are a few that just stand on their own as easily some of our favorites! NAF Atsugi has to be on the hardest designed challenge that we have had the privilege to design from the ground up. It was our First Puzzle Challenge Coin It tested what we could do as a manufacturer! It tested what we could bring to life from metal. Before we were able to bring to life one of favorite custom designed challenge coins, lets start from the beginning! The design concept was pretty straight forward, the client wanted a dragon chasing its tail that broke apart into six pieces to represent the commands on the base. We immediately knew it was a project that we wanted to do! the issues we had to get around:

weight // if its too heavy it would fall apart in your hand, not much of a puzzle challenge coin if it does that…. More like a stale nasty cookie, no one wants that!
thickness. how do we get the detail, but keep it thin enough to get the weight down. Also had to be thick enough to hide the magnets
Timeline, none of this was going to be a standard coin; however, the timeline was condensed due to the Season of Pride

Communication and Art

With every Coin that we work, our team got together and talked about the design and time requirements and possible pain points and how we could get around them! We designated a design lead for the project and it was off to the races! This project Grady got to business and started with a hand drawling of the dragon. Once completed he digitized and submitted to the client for approval. Due to the abbreviated timeline, we remained in constant contact with the client over the next few days to hammer out the projects and when we were completed it was ready for CNC. For those of you new to the Custom Challenge Coin game, there are three different types of Art prior to having a coin made.

Concept, this is done by your company depending on their skill they may or may not use the second type of art
Factory, this is the concept art redefined by the factory, we don’t use this version of art
CNC Art, ALWAYS REQUEST THIS, this is the computerized 3D landscaped of elevation of the coin. A non color version of what the coin will actually look like when it is created. Of course we would love for you to use us when making your custom coins; however, if you don’t ALWAYS request this image prior to sample.

Adapt and Overcome

Now here is where we started understanding the issues that we were tackling and how to fix them. We were looking at making a Big bold coin, that wasn’t going to work in this project. The first request from the client was that the dragon be 8mm thick and the inside be 4mm like a standard designed Challenge coin. Here lies the problem, as soon as we starting working the math into the equation. yep, we design Challenge coins and I just wrote that we used Math our Pizza Dragon Puzzle design Challenge Coin was out the window! the Stuffed Crust dragon would be too heavy to keep the center together. Back to the design board, how thin would we have to go to make it workable? How would we make the 3D still Kill? Oh and yeah, still need to make sure we have them on time…..

So I started reaching out to our manufacturing partners about different processes, 95% of all Custom Challenge Coins are created in the same manner. We CNC a reverse mold and we press the two pieces together like a clam shell with a softer metal in the middle. But with that we need deep lines for great 3D cuts. Now there is a second method where each coin is CNC’d one at a time, the process is pain staking longer (here’s that time thing again) but the detail would be amazing very little polishing was required prior to plating (gained some time back) this might be the winner.

Final Thoughts

So after careful thought and communication with both the client and the manufacture we proceeded with the CNC manner and what you see is the final outcome. An amazing beautiful work of art that masquerades as a Puzzle designed custom Challenge Coin!