The Custom Enamel Pin Design Process

Have you ever wondered how that fancy proof we sent you was made? If so, you’ll join the many customers we have that have had their curiosity piqued by the designing process of their custom pins. So how does all this pin magic kick off? Let’s dive into it.

Step 1: Your Ideas

Compiling your ideas into an email is the best way to get this whole process started. There’s a couple forms this could be done in. Many of our customers might not have the artistic or software capabilities to assemble a design for us so they write a detailed description of what their pin should look like. Others sketch their idea onto paper and scan or take a picture of it (cell phone camera, etc.) and email that to us. This is the preferred method, if available to you, because we can better understand placement of details like wording, imagery, etc. Feel free to include specific colors in the email along with any necessary graphic resources such as logos and fonts.

Step 2: We Plan Your Design

Once we have your ideas, we forward them to one of our in-house graphic designers. Utilizing Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator, they start assembling your design resources along with our own ideas that come up from a discussion between the designer and customer representative. With years of experience in creating custom lapel pins, our team members aim for accuracy with what the order requires along with an aesthetically pleasing layout. Wherever information was not provided by you, our customer, we fill in with what compliments your custom pin the best. This may be metal plating colors, font faces, shapes and wording.

Step 3: We Create a Vector Illustration

Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard when creating custom enamel pins. Being able to accurately design at size, with infinite scalability, its the obvious graphic design solution for our company. Our graphic designers utilize the software to design a flat color, 2D representation of your pin. This vector design isn’t initially provided to our customers as its a rather boring, barebones image they conveys only the most important information to our production department.

Step 4: We Turn the Vector Illustration into a Raster Graphic

The “proof” or mock up that you see when we email you a quote is made with a different program, the aforementioned Adobe Photoshop. Excellent in creating colorful, web graphics, this piece of software allows us to easily add dimension, metal like patterns and other graphical elements that help illustrate a custom lapel pin’s real life look and feel. 

Step 5: We Submit Your Design to You and Revise it if Necessary

Sometimes the first proof isn’t exactly what our customers were expecting and that’s totally okay with us! We are happy to revise our renderings of your design until you’re satisfied. You can simply reply back with the revision if it is easy enough for you to describe with words. If it is a bit more complicated than that, feel free to print out the proof and markup the design as necessary and email it back to us.