The LVL UP MakerCoin fiasco (turned out great) (part 1)

You know how sometimes, there's this really big project that you just don't want to work on, so you come up with a little side project to work on instead? That's how this all started.

I was working on a 3D design for a LVL UP trophy. Had I ever designed a trophy? No, what an absurd question. Who designs trophies? Is there an official title? Trophologist? Trophiary? Tropher Grace? Tropher Grace is the correct answer now and always.

Anyway. Trophy. I'll get into the trophy project at a later date. For now, what's important to understand is that, at the time, the full extent of my 3D experience was 3D printing, not designing for 3D printing. Designing an 8-10 inch tall, completely original trophy was a daunting task. So, one day, both out of boredom and also in an attempt to sharpen my skills with a new design, I designed a quick maker coin.

Maker coins are a whole lot of things all at once. They're a solid benchmark print for new materials or new printers, they're great sample swatches to print in new filaments, they're often handed out at maker fairs and gathering as like a token instead of a business card, and, if you're really bored, you can talk to them. You can talk to most things if you're bored.

In roughly an hour, I banged out a pretty cool, simple LVL UP logo design.

Boom. Project complete. Pack it in. Back to the trophy. I did something nobody asked for, did a pretty good job, but now it's time to get back to work.

Okay. That's more coins. Sure, why not? I mean, they're fast prints. That's like... Only one or two days' worth of printing. But seriously, there's that trophy project that actually needs to get done on a deadline. 

Or, I guess I could print a basket to hold all even more coins. They need to go somewhere, and it's not like I could just get a small box and ALSO STOP PRINTING THESE COINS. That would be unreasonable.

But what does Shawn at LVL UP think of these coins I made? I HAVE NO IDEA, I FORGOT TO ASK.

Thankfully, Shawn was on board. He really latched onto the idea of handing out these coins instead of business cards. He said that it would be awesome if the website was printed on these somewhere. 

Most people would've asked for feedback and design approval long before printing a hundred plus coins. I did not do this. Now, I need to put a website on these things.

Not only was it too late to fix what had already been printed, but I found another issue in short order. The coins were rather small; 50mm across. The cutouts left only a middle "island" of about 30mm, with the logo eating up almost every bit of it, and a 3mm ring around the outside. Neither spot would allow me to put in 3D-printable and legible text. 

So at this point, it's either 100% back to the drawing board and start from scratch, find a miracle new technology, or tell Shawn it was impossible. I told Shawn that the only way I could think of to get tiny but legible text onto these things was with something like a laser engraver.

The next day, this showed up.

Continued in part 2.