❖ Version History ❖

15th-21st of June 2022
As we had discussed a few chapters back in the Librarium games Design Journal during our conversation on ‘Muychandizin‘ (part 28 of the Calendra Journal), we had started looking into other products that could be made to support the fun of Calendra in stylish ways.

One of the best things discovered in this process was the creation of custom enamel pins. While that had been mostly a theory in the moment, with lots and lots of investigation into pricing and manufacturing options, the conclusion of that tale was that we had happily landed on a manufacturer called: ViviPins, who gave us a great quote and offer on our production that we could not ignore. But what is the process of making pins professionally like from the design side? Well, let’s talk about it!

In case you forgot, or don’t want to go back and read, remember that we started off production by finding the right manufacturer and sending out our designs to be proofed and quoted on price. With ViviPins, the conversation was begun with a digital proof of our artwork alongside some very specific color codes for the enamel:

This phase is very important in two ways. Firstly, the goal is to create very crisp & simple designs that come through clear, so as to give a professional look in the end, and not make the enamel look wrong when it is set into place. The second goal here is to keep the color pallets as simple as possible. This is relevant for two reasons, because it creates less opportunity for error, and it keeps everything cheaper in the end (you pay by the color in many instances).

Once the color pallets have been decided upon and agreed upon by everyone in the process, it is time for the payment to go through. After the purchase has been made, the molds for the designs can be created (which is the featured image at the top of this post). These molds are the critical element in the design of the pins, because each mold can be used thousands of times over to generate the raw metal designs where the enamel will then be set and dried.

When the metal plating is created, the pins are about half way through the production process. At this step, all of the black colors in the design are created by the raised black metal, and there is an empty reservoir of space where the enamel will then later be placed. The raw metal plated pins look super cool without their enamel colors yet, because you can tell exactly how the finished design will look, but you can also see how crisp & precise the initial layout comes through (which is why strong early designs are so important!)

For us, we started this process having ordered almost 1,000 pins (to get prepared for the Kickstarter rewards in the Calendra Campaign, and potentially have some extra to sell out of the Librarium Games Online Store & upcoming events in the years to come). So, getting 1,000 pins through the molding process took a couple of days, but very shortly after this was done, we started receiving images from the manufacturing facility showing us the results of the enamel being placed into the designs:

In an incredibly fast turn around time, digital proofs were sent to us (literally only about a week after our first conversation), and it was amazing to see the results come in!

To be honest, I had been somewhat extra nervous about this process because I wasn’t really sure how “good” the pins were going to look after I had conceived of the project. I thought that they might be cool, but I have also never made anything like this before, and it was simply wonderful having the proofs look anywhere near as good as they did in this image. I had been standing at work when the email came in, and I could not help myself from showing everyone else in the company what was going on!

Only a few more days of production were needed in order to get these pins finished, and then they were getting shipped out to us at the end of that week. To keep things as cheap as I could in the process I had decided not to order any sort of packaging materials for the pins because I had hoped to make these myself, so be sure to tune in again soon so that we can talk about what making our own packaging for these products looked like from the design side of things!