Any alumnus of a design school working in the field will tell you that they miss their college days where the concept was the most important part of a project. In the real world most assignments come with restrictions from branding guidelines, excessive direction from an art director, unheeded direction from the client, etc. This was not the case with lifetokens, especially in the design of the actual tokens. At least at product launch, lifetokens were to be almost pure concept. How can we visually purify human feelings down to their simplest parts?

When Jamie, liketokens owner, came to us he did have a clear idea of what a lifetoken should be but only a loose idea of how to get there. There was an initial list of 10 ’sentiments’, a color scheme put in place by the logo and the physical media. 1.5″ diameter wooden tokens which would be painted with unique white paint to would allow us to print full color on them. We felt the biggest hurdle was going to be getting one token done so we could establish a style for the whole series.

We began by going in several different directions, most of which were clearly wrong from the get go. However a few of the original designs and sketches were beginning to feel right. One set of designs, the infographic inspired set, really stood out and would become the basis of the final tokens.

Infographics concept series – Anyone who knows me knows that I have a passion for information graphics and I was interested in trying to create ‘infographics’ based on our 10 sentiments. Visually, this idea was getting really close to what Jamie had in mind for the tokens, but the text and stylized human figures were a little too literal for our first series. Still, we knew we were on the right track.

Now that we could smell our final style, it was time to brainstorm and find matching designs for each sentiment. For some this would come very easily and for others it would take several rounds. Unlike most design problems, the focus here was not to make sure each token clearly communicated the same message to every person but instead to portray the feeling of each sentiment while leaving the exact meaning a little cryptic.

The 10 original sentiments were: Inner Circle, New Friendship, Lasting Love, New Love, Platonic Love, Thank You, Proud of You, Say Sorry, I Forgive You and Missing You.

Sentiments like “New Love“, “Proud of You” and “Inner Circle” came together easily. Some were even based directly off of their original design in the infographic series.

Other sentiments took many rounds of revisions and failures before we were finally happy with the design.

While it was really exciting to have a full series of lifetokens designed and ready, there was one final very important thing that needed to be created and finalized before we could move forward with the rest of the project. A single design for the reverse side of the tokens to match the series, giving special consideration to the unique retrieval code printed on each one.

If you haven’t already done so, check out all of the token designs (including alternate colors) in the lifetokens shop and check back often because plans are already underway to add new series’ in the future.