As inlay design submissions start to filter in over the next week, I think it's a good time to have a roundtable discussion on the topic of shaped inlays for the Protege chip. No other chip out there has them, and they really haven't even been produced for casinos in over 20 years, so this should be a distinguishing feature of the Protege line.
As discussed in previous threads, we've got a 95% confidence level at this point that true punched/shaped inlays will be available for this line. Thus, for the purposes of the inlay design contest, we are assuming that true punched/shaped inlays (not printed shapes) can be done at this point. If it turns out that shaped inlays are not possible, we will have to revert all shaped inlay submissions to round ones. If this transpires, designers will be given ample opportunity to modify their designs to accommodate the inlay shape changes.
We're going to try to offer six shapes: hub, scallop, cogwheel, hexagon, star, and the 4 1/2 moon. From the field of historical inlays, this represents all of them except: wheel, tri-point, and points. Wheel is essentially a duplicate of the more popular cogwheel. Tri-point, while used on some $1000 chips historically, was rarely used, takes up a lot of space on the inlay, and just generally looks a little goofy. The points creates manufacturing Q/C issues. So we've got six shapes, plus round to work with.
As the Protege line follows a fairly traditional path with regard to colors, here's what I'm initially thinking for the Protege line:
The shapes on the $1 chip thru the $500 chip follow pretty entrenched casino standards ($1 - Round; $5 - Hub; $25 - Scallop; $100 - Cogwheel; $500 - Hexagon). I'm thinking the 25 cent chip should remain somewhat plain, so perhaps a round inlay. On the high-end, I just used the star for one and the 4 1/2 moon for the other. The NCV can be whatever, but round makes the most sense IMHO.
One of the most important impacts this will have on inlay design is size. Shaped inlays reduce the printing space down quite a bit, and different shapes require different space on the chip, so you've got to design your inlay to the smallest shape, which in our case will be the star, closely followed by the 4 1/2 moon and the cogwheel. In my estimation, the shapes on the chip factory are actually larger shapes than will ultimately be on the the Protege chip line. The final shaped inlays will be much more similarly proportioned to historical chips like below - note how each chip has an inner circle where the inlay of the chip is to reside. The shapes all are inside of this by a good cushion (as opposed to the chip factory where the shapes almost seem to touch that inner circle). The Protege line shape proportions will be more like those below.
I'd like to hear any feedback and/or questions you have on shaped inlays:
Do you like the proposed shapes with each denomination as presented above?
Do you like a round inlay on the 25c chip?
What do you like on the NCV chip?
What type of inlay designs do you think would work best on a line with shaped inlays?
And so on...
10/5/07
Linear Mode
