We are frequently asked how we come up with the badge designs. Let us show you what goes into the evolution of a badge, from idea to production.
Our Kickstarter Campaign is live! Visit us at Scareitbadges.com/kickstarter to support us and make these badges come to life!
We get a lot of great ideas for badges from all of you, but, unfortunately, we cannot create them all. First, we have to think about whether this will be a badge that everyone wants, or is it a something for only a few. Then we have to figure our an image that will be small, recognizable, and we are allowed to use. This means we may have to purchase our images from an artist or a site and modify them for use in our application – no Freddy, Jason, or Chucky images as we can’t afford the fees needed to use them.
One of our first group of badges is the Crowd Favorite, and we wanted an iconic “thumbs up” design that a certain site uses already…so it had to be different than that. We sketched out the idea of a skeletal thumbs up, something that I’d seen before on some posts, but one that we could adapt.
The design could not be too detailed because we were going to be embroidering it instead of printing it – which has some limits on how detailed you can make it. We found an image, and found out that licensing of an image is more complicated if you are going to use if for something other than a website or a TV screen…and costlier too. We finally had an image that we could use, but we weren’t sure if it would work…
After searching around locally, I found someone who was able to create some prototypes locally. See, when you go to a larger design studio, they charge you for the design and then charge you for each badge, and the price is costly if you only want very few of them. My local person does this out of her home and I had her create 1 copy of each badge at a price that included both converting it into a file her embroidery machine could understand, and creating the badge with an iron-on backing. It turned out pretty good for a first attempt, so I ordered another couple copies of each badge design that I had given her.
After ironing them onto a shirt, I wore it to a few events to get people’s reactions – and they were pretty positive. People like the idea and started giving us new ideas for designs they would like to see.
Now we had to turn this into a product that we could get to our customers. We eventually found a company to produce the badges for us, so we gave them 3 designs. We ordered the 2017 Most Dead-icated with red borders, the same with gold borders, for perfect attendance, and this Crowd Favorite.
