Coins are 1.25″ in diameter, minted in bronze with a light patina applied to “age” the coins.
We collaborated with uber-Karas insider, Ishmael. He’s become an official member of the team with all of the work he’s done with and for us on Vertex artwork and Coin artwork. He’s basically our version of Batman. We throw up the bat-signal because we need a piece of art for something cool, Ishmael appears, we have a quick discussion, and suddenly Gotham is villain-free and we’ve got art. It’s a beautiful relationship.
This year we gave him the idea of using the Golden Ratio which is the graphic representation of the Fibonacci Sequence. We’ve talked about showcasing art from previous coins for a while; by using the portions of the Golden Ratio as a collage to “house” the artwork, we could accomplish that while creating something fresh and new. A simple border with KARAS PEN COMPANY and the year is the order border of the “heads” side of the coin.
The “tails” side reuses the “gear” style border and our favorite saying from the early days of the company “Dozens of Satisfied Customers”. The background features a stripped down schematic design referencing the old blueprints used by machinists. For the K Shield logo, we went with a version of our logo that we rarely use, it’s a very stripped down version primarily used in laser marking, but it looked very clean and perfect for the back of the coin.
