❖ Version History ❖

29th of June 2022
Previously on the Librarium Games Design Journal we laid out the whole production process behind creating enamel pins with a manufacturer. Today, we are going to take a moment to appreciate the stunning beauty of our production prototypes that arrived in the mail today (featured in the image above) and then get into the conversation of what we want to do with custom packaging for these products as the full batch is on its way to us in the mail.

To begin, let’s explain what we are talking about when it comes to the packaging. These pins, when ordered in bulk have a few options on what you can pay for in the production packaging. The freebie option is to simply have the pins placed into tiny individual plastic bags that are sealed at the top with a smidge of glue. These packages, with the pins already inside of them, look like this upon arrival:

Now, while the pin looks nice enough as it is to sell at the weight of gold (sorry, biased), it does not look as professional as I would like to in this packaging. It very much looks like it came out of a candy dispenser or something of that nature, where I want it to look more like a high quality item in a gift shop.

To fix this situation, I needed to wait for these prototypes to arrive so that I could take measurements of the bag itself and see what we working with for dimensions. What we need in the end is something that fits nicely in the bag with the pin attached to it (like a small custom printed piece of card stock), and ideally, we want this piece of art to be simple & small so that we can print lots and lots of them for an affordable price on as few sheets of paper as possible.

By some degree of luck, the dimensions of the package are almost exactly 1.5″x2.5″, which works out nicely for all of our goals. It means that if we make a design that fits this space exactly, we can print twenty of them per sheet of standard 8.5″x11″ sized paper. Now all that has to be done is concoct a design that is simple enough to be printed for cheap but still look nice, and luckily I already have a great idea for how to achieve this.

To save as much money as possible on the actual ink in the printer, I decide to go and get several sheets of colored card stock & design something using only the color black. This way, it appears to the naked eye that the design is in full color, when in reality the design is simply using black in on colored paper. With a couple of hours dropped into graphic art time, I very quickly come up with this for my print test:

To be honest, on the first attempt I was very happy with the results (which almost never happens). It takes a few tries to get the exact shape of the paper right though. The reason behind this is that, while the dimensions of the bag are very straightforward, the paper (obviously) needs to be made smaller than these dimensions, which I had not considered before finishing the first batch. The other detail that I had not considered at first is that the pin being attached to this paper also requires a very specific and small slice of extra space for the bag to close properly, which removes some height from the top of the design if it is going to be snug the way we want.

After taking the time to correct for these variables, we come to a much better design that fits absolutely perfectly within the package:

Now that we have the dimensions & measurements of the designs fitting to the scale of the prototypes, we just need to mass produce that concept in such a way that it can accommodate all of the pins that we have ordered (a mere 800x the amount of work shown in this photograph hah!).

But. Luckily, we do not yet even have all of these pins. We have only got these few manufacturing prototypes at the moment, so for the time being we will put the project in the incubator and await the arrival of the big batch! Be sure to tune in next time to see how that turns out!