50 Rejected Merit Badges, Info Cards

6 CommentsSunday • February 7, 2010 • by admin

A deck of 50 cards could be really cool, or really boring. I decided to make mine as entertaining as possible. I grew up in the Boy Scout program, I thought it would be fun to reminisce a little with this project.

Project overview and objectives | Make a collection of 50 items and then develop a concept that ties all of them together. Produce a well crafted box with 50 cards.

What I learned | This project was one of the most involved and extensive for me at the time. I found that there is great value to peer review and critique of ideas and approaches. My initial idea involved a wooden box with a burned insignia. I wanted to embroider each merit badge, but found that it would cost about 3000 dollars to do it, since it is a 20-50 dollar fee to set up per badge. I did design the badges using Pantone colors that are available for thread as well (in case I ever want to go get them produced). One of my biggest challenges was designing a 3-D surface and constructing the card box. Now that I have gone through the process, I could probably do something like this again quite easily. I learned about proper use of registration marks on a document. I also was able to improve my digital craftsmanship through proper file managment.

Process | For the first part of this project I had to collect 50 random objects. I chose to actually go door to door to do this and see what things people were willing to part with, but that were cool. I ended up with some interesting things like: an AK47 bullet, russian money, an old alarm clock, an ostrich egg, and lots of other knick knacks. The main reason for collecting these objects was to see if I could find a theme that I could generate into a story or a common thread for the cards.

I made an Idea list based on the stuff in the box.

After deciding to go with rejected merit badges I made a fake merit badge list of about 150 or so options. I talked to family and friends and had them choose the best ones.

Next I took the best choices and began to sketch basic ideas of how I could create each icon. In some cases things weren’t working at this stage, it was a good point to either adjust ideas or drop them for new ones.

Once I had sketches for almost all of the badges I went to Illustrator and began creating the designs as vectors. For the color pallet I started working in Pantone colors due to my initial intention to get each of these badges embroidered. In the meantime I also had to be thinking about the other pieces of the project including the card layout, the box design, and the instructional insert as well.

For each card I used images of troop number patches and fabric swatches that felt very much like a scout uniform. I placed each piece of artwork onto the respective card in InDesign and also began to design and write copy for the back. The cards were all in one massive file with 100 pages, so managing the files and links was a bit of a challenge. I haven’t ever designed for a 3-D surface before this project, so it was a bit of a learning curve. It was nice to have Joshua Balleza come and teach us how to construct and wrap a box, that helped out quite a bit. After figuring out that my wooden box idea wouldn’t work. I gave in to constructing about 3 different chipboard boxes using PVA book glue. I was pretty frustrated with how difficult it was to measure each piece right and to get it to look nice. Eventually I was able to construct a good box. For the box wrap design I bought a scout shirt for the project from a local thrift store. I used my own merit badge sash, my scout handbook, and the scout shirt for a photo shoot for the front of the box. I also bought a “5″ and a “0″ troop patch from a local craft store. After compositing the imagery I wanted onto the box wrap, I printed and applied it to the box after trimming it out.

The box wrap design as a flat Illustrator file:

Download the entire deck of cards.

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