When we talk to friends and colleagues about the lifetokens project, the big mystery seems to be “how does he print the tokens?”. We could do a whole week just on the trials and tribulations of printing that glorious first token, but for now we will skip ahead to the process we finally settled on.

In the beginning there were two general options of printing the tokens. Option one was having a stock of tokens printed somewhere. There are places online that specialize in printing ‘wooden nickles‘ but the cons of leaving it up to someone else were obvious. Little opportunity for quality control and tweaking, slow turn around when stock gets low and expensive. It was obvious we needed to move the process in-house. After a lot of research (we even tried to build a printer), Jamie settled on using a flatbed printer based on a modified Epson 1390. Printing the tokens in-house solved all kinds of problems such as printing the unique token code on the back and allowing us to keep lower stock of more tokens.

The solution printer also opened up one new problem, there is no special ’software’ out there to help with printing lifetokens on a flatbed printer. A custom tray was created to sit on the bed of the printer to hold up to 20 tokens in place (we will try to get photos of this tray) and Jamie needed to be able to select designs and have them print at the exact same place every time. Unless we expected him to purchase and learn Illustrator himself, it was obvious this software would have to be custom.

Thus the lifetokenstock app was born. Developed in Adobe AIR, we were able to simplify the printing process greatly.

Printing – the primary function of the application is to print the tokens. Using the application you can add up to 20 tokens of any design to print. After printing the front of the token, the application then instructs you to flip the token over before printing the back.

Updating – all of the token graphics are packaged with the application in .swf format. This allows us to add and update token designs by simply sending him an updated version.

Generating Token Codes – another big challenge to the printing process was storing the codes on each token correctly in the lifetokens.com database. The codes used by the printing application are generated by first checking the database to ensure they are not already used. Then, only after Jamie confirms the tokens printed correctly does it send the codes back to the database, adding the new token to stock.

Positioning – because everything needs a little tweaking, we were able to give Jamie the ability to reposition the tokens using very precise increments.

This portion of the project was a lot of fun and I’m sure we will be adding more functionality and tweaks as the company grows.