5 Fun Ways to Make Your Enamel Pins Unique
Check out our top 5 fun ways to make a unique enamel pin!
Lapel pins are fun, and designing them should be fun too! Here at Pin Depot, we know all the ins and outs of custom pin design, so you don’t have to be a pro artist to make something amazing! Our professional designers will do the heavy lifting while you focus on coming up with the best ideas for your pins! That being said, we have some suggestions to help you get started.
If you’re wondering how best to make your pins stand out, check out the 5 fun ways to make a unique enamel pin below!
#1 Pick an Uncommon Plating Option
Gold and silver are the most popular plating options for custom pins, so choosing something less common will help your design shine out from the crowd! Two options we’d love to see used more often are black metal and rainbow metal!
Black metal creates a bold sense of contrast when you pair it with bright enamel colors. The dark outlines it creates are perfect for character artwork and logos with small details! If you’re looking for a sleek, modern design, but don’t want to settle for high polish silver plating, black metal is the way to go!
Rainbow metal, sometimes called iridescent metal, looks amazing and it’s a rare option in the custom lapel pin world. It’s a high polish plating, like gold or silver, but under direct light, the surface mixes hews of purple, blue, yellow, and green! It’s perfect for sci-fi and technology-inspired pins, and pins designed for cybersecurity teams or conferences.
If you really want to stick with the traditional gold, silver, or copper plating, there’s still a way to make it look special: Dual plating! Dual plating is when you take two different plating options and use them on the same design. Gold and silver look great together! We’ve also seen copper and black nickel used together to create a striking effect!
#2 Choose a Glitter or Glow Enamel
An easy way to help your pins stand out is to choose a glitter enamel or add glow-in-the-dark enamel to allow your pins to shine at all hours of the day!
We can make any shade of glitter enamel you need, so if you have a specific color in mind, just let us know! The glitter inside the enamel paint with sparkle under any direct light, creating an eye-catching effect that people will love! Many of our customers use glitter enamel to spell out words or phrases or to spice up a logo, but you can use it for any part of your design!
Glow-in-the-dark enamel is usually white during the day, but once it charges up with some UVs, it glows green at night! If you prefer blue, yellow, or red, don’t sweat it! The white enamel that glows green is the most popular option, but there are other options as well! Just let us know what you’re looking for!
#3 Add an Interactive Element
Some of the most popular pins are the ones that appeal to the fidget spinner fans! Spinners, danglers, sliders, and bobbles are all unique upgrades to consider adding to your design. Another fun option is to create a hinge in your design. We’ve seen pins with doors that swing open to reveal secret parts of the design, pins designed to look like flip phones, and more! There are endless opportunities to create fun, interactive designs. It just takes a little imagination to come up with something fun that will take your pins to the next level!
#4 Design a Custom Backstamp
Sometimes you get so caught up with the front of your pins, that you completely forget about the back! A custom backstamp is like a little signature you can add to your pins. Some of our customers design a whole series of pins for their fans and followers, and for wholesale, and most of them include a fun backstamp as a means of boosting their brand and expanding their audience.
Backstamps can also have important contact information, so if you’re designing pins for community outreach or marketing, add a phone number or email to your backstamp! You’d be surprised how effective such a small addition can be!
If a backstamp isn’t something you’re looking for, changing up your attachment options is another way to use the back of your pins to help them stand out! Besides the free butterfly clutches, we offer colored rubber clutches, magnets, safety pins, jewelry clutches, and deluxe clutches!
#5 Consider Custom Shapes and Cutouts
All the pins we design are manufactured from scratch, so don’t worry about sticking to traditional shapes like circles, squares, and diamonds. If you want your pins to really make an impact, they need to have a custom shape! And while your design is taking shape, don’t forget about cut outs!
For our corporate customers, being able to make pins in any shape or size makes it easy to recreate logos and emblems down to the smallest details. Schools often design pins in the shape of their mascot or of iconic things like open books, scrolls, and graduation caps! When thinking of a shape for your pins, think about who they are for and where people will find them.
Bonus Tip: Order Pins With Custom Cardstock
Like custom backstamps, cardstock offers you an extra surface to expand your design, boost your brand, and frame your pins in a beautiful way! A lot of the pin sellers we partner with ask us to create cardstock because it helps their pins stand out when on display! You don’t even have to worry about attaching the pins to the cards - our manufacturing team will carefully set each pin on a piece of cardstock and wrap them in a protective wrapping so they are ready to go right out of the box!
Don’t Wait to Start Designing With Us!
Making enamel pins is a creative process from start to finish. Let your creativity flow, and see what you can come up with! As long as you keep these tips in mind, you’re sure to end up with a design that turns heads! We’re excited to start working with you - just fill out a free quote form, share a couple of ideas, and let’s make something incredible together!
