K-9 units have a particular personality due to their specific duty and training, which emphasizes the development of a partnership between police canines and their handlers. Designing a K-9 Unit challenge coin requires capturing this special relationship. This article about K-9 unit challenge coins from All About Challenge Coins aims to provide you with some ideas for your own K-9 unit coin.
In Search Of Motive
We’re approached by clients who know exactly what they want in their K-9 unit coin, while other clients have no idea what they’re looking for but still want something that represents their unit’s unique individuality. Whatever the case, the inspiration for the designs of K-9 units might come from a variety of places. When deciding on the design of your challenge coin, begin by asking yourself these questions. To what extent does your K-9 unit carry out its mandate? There are various duties for which police canines and their handlers are trained as a team, including looking for illicit substances, following criminals on the run, tracking individuals, and discovering the missing. Try to incorporate any specialties or roles that your team’s handlers and canines are particularly proud of into your design. What purpose do you have in mind for your commemorative coins? Consider the rationale behind your decision to purchase K-9 unit challenge coins. Do you want your team to be more cohesive? Do you intend to use the coins to raise money for a good cause near you? Canines and their handlers that go above and above for the community should be recognized. Answering these concerns and figuring out how to incorporate them into a design is a crucial step in the brainstorming process. Creating a coin to honor a retired police dog will have quite different design features than creating a challenge coin to aid in raising funds for a dog shelter charity campaign.
Consider asking your K-9 unit for input on what components of their job or symbolism they take pride in when trying to determine what symbols or characteristics are most significant for a design. Asking around can be the greatest approach to find out what’s most essential at the station, whether it’s a distinctive motto or in-joke around the department or unusual law enforcement circumstances they’ve dealt with. So, for instance, a coin we created for the Dallas Police K-9 Squad displays a photo and tagline of one of the unit’s trained german shepherds, such as “Committed to all, faithful to one”. By including the motto, the coin is more defined as commemorating the Dallas Police K-9 Unit, making it easier to recognize as a unit coin.
Determine The Exact Location Of K-9 Unit Coins And 3D Images Of Dogs
As expected, a police dog is one of the most often shown designs on practically every K-9 challenge coin. Many K-9 units, on the other hand, go the extra mile by including photos of individual police dogs from their unit on the design of their coins. This honors the particular training of the unit as well as their canine partners while personalizing a unit’s challenge coin. Look at the challenge coin we created for the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) K-9 Unit, for instance. Law enforcement motifs like the thin blue line above U.S. flag on the reverse of the coin highlight the coin’s goal of honoring CPD officers and other law enforcement officials in the subtle design components. The main design on the coin’s obverse, which shows one of the department’s latest Vapor Wake bomb detecting canines, distinguishes it as a K-9 Unit coin. As a distinctive symbol for CPD K-9 officer responsibilities, the picture based on a photo of a CPD police dog resonates more powerfully and better recognizes their unique position than a coin using more broad police insignia or symbols.
To turn a police dog’s picture into a challenge coin, just give us photos of the dog and ask us to do it. To make a K-9 coin even more personal, K-9 officers might choose to feature the actual canines they deal with every day. Consider using a 3D coin design to better depict the picture of a dog on your coin if you pick this option. A police dog may be shown in an intriguing way even without 3D, as you can see from the CPD coin example. While becoming 3D gives a more lifelike representation of the dog, it’s also one of our prior K-9 unit customers’ most requested improvements.
Adapting Symbols And Slogans For Local Law Enforcement
They are a specialist element of the police force, but they are part of the “thin blue line” that defends citizens with their canine friends. Both quadrupedal and bipedal members of a K-9 team work together with detectives and other law enforcement units at their station to coordinate their activities. If you’d want to honor a K-9 unit’s day-to-day work alongside other units, consider adapting an existing law enforcement organization’s insignia, badges, or phrases.
Images of K-9 police dogs aren’t the only way to celebrate the cooperation between police canines and their handlers for an organization to depict. Some K-9 units prefer subtler ways to show their affinity with their dogs, such as using a dog’s pawprint or teeth in the design. Customers have been known to provide photos of a cast of a police dog’s pawprint in order to use it as a reference for their own canine officers. Cut-to-form coins are preferable since they allow you to customize the design of the coin to whatever shape or appearance you like. Using a coin cutter to cut-to-form allows clients to imprint their organization’s identity on the actual shape of the coin.
You Get to Make a Decision
Challenge Coins 4 U receives many design requests and ideas from law enforcement agencies across North America, as well as globally. We will work with you to design the right coin 4 U. At the end of the day, your coin tells a story. We are here to help you tell it. So go ahead and contact us for a free quote over at sales@challengecoins4u.com or call us at 844-270-0400. Check out our porfolio over at Instagram (@challengecoins4u).
