What’s the Best Art for Chocolate Coins?

American Gothic

This is a question we get a lot. With more and more people and companies looking to add that personal touches to their favors, we see all types of artwork submitted. Truth is, when customizing your chocolate coins or chocolate casino chips, the simpler, the better.

In order to create your custom stamping plates, we use what’s called “line art.” Think of line art as a pencil sketch…black and white colors only with no grayscale shading at all. But not all pencil drawings are the same! Here’s an example of line art that would work beautifully as an imprint on chocolate coins.

Mario

This art has everything going for it.

  • Not too detailed.
  • Black & white with no shading.
  • High resolution, which results in sharp edges.
  • In other words…perfect.

 

 

Contrast this with another image that presents all sorts of problems when it comes to chocolate coins imprinting.

joker

Blech.

Often when looking at a drawing against a white background it would seem like it would work fine as a coin imprint. But the thing to remember is that there is no color differentiation on a chocolate coin. It’s either at the surface level of the coin, or debossed (pressed) into the foil. This makes it a lot more difficult to see fine details.

 

 

Here are the above two images stamped on a coin.

Mario chocolate coin
Joker chocolate coin

 

See what I mean? One looks wicked awesome while the other just looks wicked.

A common question is whether we are able to work with a photo, usually a person’s profile. The quick answer is, yes, we are able to convert photos to line art for an additional fee. But a lot is dependent on the individual face. Some faces will translate well to a coin and others simply don’t look recognizable. Again, the simpler, the better. The less details needed to distinguish the face, the more accurate the imprint will be.

So once we get the face looking good on the coin, the inevitable response is “Wow, that looks terrific! You guys rule!! Now can we just add ‘Happy Birthday’ above his face and his name underneath? The more elements we add to the small canvas (chocolate coins are 1.5” diameter), the smaller everything has to be to fit it all in. When in doubt, go large. Your imprint will always look better at a larger size than scrunched down to fit in the middle of arched text.

With regard to file type…we can work with almost all types. The following are all acceptable: eps, tif, jpg, gif, pdf, ai, psd.

And that’s about all there is to it. It’s not as complicated as might think. Let us know how we can help design your personalized chocolate coins or chocolate casino chips and make them uniquely yours.