Are We Going to Make a 2025 Challenge Coin?
Artwork is challenging; sometimes I want to take my iPad and Apple pencil and chuck them in the trash. However, lately I’ve been feeling a little more creative and artistic. The digital pieces in my mock up collection continue to grow and have been growing at a faster rate over the last couple of months. I love the freedom that I have in creating designs digitally in comparison to pencil and paper. Mostly because there seem to just be more controls without needing additional tools. I can’t draw a perfect circle in real life without a stencil, but I can in Procreate. That makes things a whole lot easier. I did well in art classes in high school, but when you don’t naturally have drawing skills it can get boring and frustrating when trying to “create” from scratch.
This year we’re working with a supplier of ours who (we have worked with over the past couple of years on other items) to make our 2025 Rob Holland Challenge Coins. They’re not the same partner that we used to make his coin in 2024. This meaning, we don’t have the original digital art files or molds from the first coin. Which is fine, since the design is changing we would need new molds and new art anyways. I prepped all the files, mock ups (wow mine were awful), and guidance into a DropBox folder and sent it off. The first draft came back as I expected (not perfect) and we send out our list of requested changes for the second draft.
Creating new designs can be exceptionally challenging when you need someone to change parts of a plane and the only way to describe them is using aviation specific terminology. Easy enough for Rob and I to run through the first draft and pick out that the bank angle of the plane itself doesn't seem to be matching the apparent bank angle of the canopy in the artwork (making the plane look slightly warped). But, if you’re not familiar with aviation, that feedback, plus the other 6 changes we wanted to make did not translate well into the second draft.
At this point I realized that it would be easier if I could just draw out the changes that we wanted to make. I didn’t really have the determination and patience to do this until I realized it would be the most efficient option. Otherwise, we would likely have gone through an additional few drafts with the designer unnecessarily doing more work - which didn’t sit well with me.
It turns out that how things look in a photo and how they look in real like don’t always translate to different mediums. I traced the image of the plane we were using as a reference at least three times and each time I looked at my drawing, the plane looked warped. It really does help to understand what you want the end-user to perceive. The whole canopy just had too much detail and exaggeration that it took away from the overall look of the plane. The outline of the canopy was what was giving it the appearance of being at a different angle than the rest of the plane, so we narrowed it down and it started to match. While it was previously completely accurate to the photo, the detail was too much and unnecessary. Once we made some changes to the plane graphic along with some color changes to piece, it just worked.
I always say you can pull lessons and inspiration from areas of life where you absolutely wouldn’t expect it. I felt great after my last art edit where it just hit me that the MX I was seeing on the coin was the same MX Rob and I both knew - even without it being a perfect match to the photo. It felt right and looked right. When we do release the coin, let us know if you can spot any of the differences between the MX in the coin and the MX in real life.
The 2025 coin is currently in production and scheduled to be released at the end of March alongside a limited edition RH patch and hoodie. We’re super excited about this one and our goal is to just keep getting better with these each year.