Custom Medals & Medallions: Materials, Ribbons, Design

How to Specify Custom Medals and Medallions for Events

An award set is usually decided months before anyone stands on a podium. By the time event day arrives, the design is locked, the tooling is finished and the boxes are sitting in a store room. What you are actually deciding in that quiet planning window is three things: whether the award looks correct in a podium photograph, whether it feels right in the hand at the moment it is given, and whether a volunteer who has never seen your sorting rules can hand the right piece to the right person under time pressure.

Those three requirements drive every specification below — the medal-versus-medallion choice, the base metal, the relief, the ribbon, and the way the finished order arrives in its cartons.

Medal or medallion? Two different jobs

The two words get used interchangeably in conversation, and they should not be in a specification. The distinction is simple, and it shapes everything downstream.

A medal is worn. It is paired with a ribbon and hung around the neck at the moment of award. Medals run from 40mm to 70mm in diameter at 2mm to 5mm thick — light enough to sit flat against a chest and stay readable in a photograph.

A medallion is displayed. Medallions are typically larger and thicker than medals and are designed for display, presentation or keepsake rather than wearing on a ribbon. Standard medallions run 40mm to 80mm, with custom sizes up to 100mm, at 4mm to 8mm thick. That extra mass is the point: it gives the piece a solid weight and feel in the hand and lets deeper relief sit on a larger face.

Decision point	Medal	Medallion
Primary job	Worn around the neck at the moment of award	Displayed, presented or kept as a keepsake
Typical size	40–70mm diameter	40–80mm standard, up to 100mm custom
Thickness	2–5mm	4–8mm
Attachment	Neck ribbon as standard; pin, clip or magnetic backing for desk display	Not ribbon-led; presentation packaging is the norm
Relief	2D, 3D raised relief and recessed detail, or colour-printed	2D or 3D, from flat designs to sculpted depth
Colour fill	Colour enamel fill for logos, event names and dates	Hard enamel or soft enamel
Packaging	Poly bag; custom display case for premium awards	Poly bag, velvet pouch, foam-lined gift box or wooden presentation case
Best-fit occasions	School sports days, swimming galas, athletics championships, martial arts tournaments and grading, corporate achievement and employee recognition, charity runs, academic competitions, service commendations	Corporate anniversaries and milestones, retirement and recognition mementos, grand openings, club and society membership, limited editions, leadership and lifetime achievement awards

In practice, the choice follows the ceremony. A race finish line needs a medal, because someone has to put it over a runner’s head while they are still breathing hard. A school sports day needs medals for the same reason, though a school may also order a medallion for a departing head teacher. A corporate milestone, a retirement gift or a museum collectible needs a medallion, because nobody is going to wear it — it goes on a desk, a shelf or into a case.

Some programmes use both deliberately: a worn medal at the ceremony, plus a display medallion for a headline award or a milestone anniversary. That works well as long as the two share a visual language, which is covered later in this guide.

Both formats are built from the same base metals and platings, which is what allows a worn medal at a finish line and a display medallion on a desk to read as one programme. Custom medals cover the worn awards and custom medallions cover the display pieces, and both share a production family with the rest of the badges and nameplates range — so one plating and finish specification carries across the whole award set.

Material and plating: matching the weight of the event

Base metal is the first thing a designer thinks about and the last thing an audience notices — until it is wrong.

Zinc alloy is the workhorse for both product types. It casts fine detail well, which matters when a design carries a mascot, a crest or a sculpted centre with small features. Brass is denser and feels heavier in the hand, and it holds a crisp edge, which suits medallions and premium placement awards. Iron is magnetic and generally reads as a lighter, more economical award; it also needs its plating to stay intact, since bare iron will corrode. Aluminium is light, which is useful on large-diameter participation pieces where a heavy medal would be uncomfortable across a long event.

Plating is where the visual hierarchy of an award set is built. Options include gold, silver, bronze, antique gold, antique silver, copper and dual-tone.

Antique finishes behave differently from polished ones. An antique gold or antique silver plate settles into the recesses and darkens them, so raised relief reads more strongly and small sculpted detail stays legible at arm’s length. A polished plate reflects light and can flatten a shallow relief under stage lighting — the detail is there, but the camera struggles to find it.

Dual-tone plating puts two finishes on one piece, for example a gold field with silver raised detail, or a silver rim around a gold centre. It is an effective way to separate a sculpted centre from a text ring, and it reads as a more elaborate award without adding size.

The most common mistake in a podium set is inconsistency across the three placements. Gold, silver and bronze should differ in plating colour only. Keep the base metal, the diameter, the thickness, the relief depth and the ribbon construction identical across all three, and stay inside one finish family — either all polished or all antique. Mixing an antique gold first place with polished silver and bronze second and third is a subtle error that shows up immediately in a podium photograph.

2D, 3D and colour-printed: choosing the relief

There are three practical ways to put artwork on a metal award, and they are not interchangeable.

Flat 2D with colour fill. The face stays flat and colour enamel fills the logo, event name, date and any block shapes. Edges are hard and clean, which suits crests, typography and simple geometry. On a 40mm medal, a 2D design with a colour-filled ring and a centred logo will read from several metres away.

3D raised relief with recessed detail. The design is sculpted: a mascot stands proud of the field, the field itself is recessed behind it, and detail is modelled in the round. This suits sports motifs, animals, figures, trophies-in-relief and anything with a recognisable silhouette. Relief depth and diameter interact directly. Deep relief on a 40mm face leaves very little flat area for text, so a design with a sculpted centre plus a ring of names usually needs 60mm or more to stay legible.

Colour printing. Printed artwork can carry shading, gradients and photographic detail that colour fill cannot reproduce — a landscape, a building, a photographic portrait, a complex illustrated scene. The trade-off is tactile: a printed surface is flatter than a cast or struck relief, so it looks richer but feels less sculpted. Many programmes combine the two, with printed colour in a recessed centre and raised metal detail around it.

Whichever route you take, judge legibility at actual size. A proof viewed at 400% on a monitor hides every problem that appears on a 45mm medal held at arm’s length.

For programmes that also include non-metal pieces on the awards table, the same relief and finish logic applies across the range — see custom trophies for how metal and non-metal awards are typically combined.

The ribbon is half the award

A medal without a ribbon is a disc. The ribbon carries the colour of the event, identifies the award level from a distance, and is the part the recipient actually touches first.

Neck ribbons come in three practical formats: single colour, dual stripe, or printed with a logo or event name. If you already have a ribbon specification, a supplier can weave or source to a supplied ribbon colour, width and printed artwork. If you are working to a short deadline or want to keep things simple, stock ribbons in common colourways are a fast path that still allows the medal design to carry the event identity.

Ribbon colour should be designed as a system, not chosen per award. A podium set reads as one programme when the three ribbons share a construction and a layout, and differ only in a controlled way. Two common approaches work well:

• Shared base, different stripe. All three ribbons use the same base colour with a single stripe in gold, silver or bronze.
• Different base, shared print. Each placement has its own ribbon colour, but all three carry the same printed event logo in the same position.

Both approaches photograph well, and both let a recipient identify the award level from across a room. What does not work is three unrelated ribbons sourced at three different times.

Ribbon length and width should match the wearer. A standard neck ribbon suits adults; a shorter ribbon keeps a medal from swinging low on a child. If the event spans both, that is worth specifying up front rather than adjusting on the day.

Not every award is worn. Pin, clip or magnetic backings let a medal or medallion sit on a desk or a display board, and custom display cases turn a premium award into a presentation piece. For a corporate recognition programme where awards are handed over in a meeting rather than on a podium, the backing and the case may matter more than the ribbon.

Designing a complete award set, not one medal

Most programmes are not one award. They are a placement set — gold, silver and bronze — multiplied by divisions, age groups or categories, plus a participation tier that is often the largest single quantity in the order.

The participation award is where programmes most often go wrong. It is usually treated as a separate, cheaper purchase, and it arrives with an unrelated design that looks like it belongs to a different event. The result is a photograph where the finishers’ medals and the participation medals have nothing to do with each other.

A better approach is to give the participation award the same visual language as the placement set — the same diameter family, the same relief approach, the same ribbon layout — while making it unmistakably not a podium award. Practical ways to do that:

• Use a different plating finish, such as an antique or a non-podium colour, so the piece reads as commemorative rather than competitive.
• Change the ribbon colour while keeping the printed logo and stripe layout identical.
• Simplify the reverse or the centre, keeping the outer ring and typography consistent.

For annual repeat events, consistency compounds. If the artwork and ribbon layout stay on file, year two is an edit rather than a redesign: change the date, keep everything else. That also means the awards from three consecutive years sit together on a wall as a set.

Personalisation: engraving names, dates and serial numbers

Optional back-side engraving turns a generic award into a specific one. On medals, back engraving is commonly used for the recipient’s name, the event date, the category or a serial number. On medallions, back engraving is often combined with individual numbering for limited-edition runs.

Per-piece variation changes the nature of an order. A single design becomes many pieces, each of which must be produced, checked and then matched to a named owner. That is a data problem before it is a production problem, and it is worth treating as one.

The data you need to collect and verify before production:

• Name lists with exact spellings, in the alphabet and capitalisation you want engraved. Confirm diacritics and hyphenation.
• Category or division labels that match the wording on your results sheet, not an internal shorthand.
• Date format — decide whether it is written out or numeric, and keep it identical across every piece in the set.
• Numbering sequence, if you are running a limited edition, including whether numbers are assigned by recipient or by production order.

The most common cause of a reprint or a remake is a name list that arrives in two versions. Freeze the list, check it once against the entry system, and only then release it for production.

Event-day logistics: sorting, packaging and distribution

This is the part of award planning that almost never gets published, and it is the part that decides whether the ceremony runs smoothly.

Awards arrive packed to protect them, not to distribute them. Medals typically ship in poly bags; medallions ship in poly bags, velvet pouches, foam-lined gift boxes or wooden presentation cases depending on the tier. Unless you specify otherwise, a bulk order arrives as bulk cartons.

Now picture a school sports day with twelve events, three placements each, and participation awards for several hundred children. If the order arrives as one bag of gold medals and one bag of silver medals, a volunteer has to count, sort and match under time pressure while a queue forms. If it arrives as twelve labelled bags of three, plus a separate participation carton, distribution becomes a two-minute job.

Specify sorting up front, and be specific about the units you want:

• By placement — gold, silver and bronze separated, never mixed in one carton.
• By division or age group — under-11s in one bag, seniors in another.
• By sport or ceremony block — particularly where several presentations happen on the same day.
• By label — ask for the carton and bag labels to use the same wording as your results sheet, so the person reading the label is reading a language they already know.

Two further details are worth deciding before packing. First, whether medals ship already threaded onto their ribbons or loose. Pre-threaded medals save time at the venue but tangle in transit; loose medals plus one person threading at a table is often faster for large volumes. Second, how many spare pieces to hold back. A small over-count in each category covers the piece that gets dropped, mis-engraved or handed to the wrong recipient.

Working back from the event date

Award production is a short, predictable sequence, but it sits at the end of a chain of decisions that are usually made too late.

The sequence runs: concept and artwork, free artwork proof, tooling, sampling, production, packing, shipping. Sampling takes 1–3 days and production runs 2–10 days depending on design complexity and quantity, so the manufacturing window itself is rarely the constraint. The constraint is the design decision.

Work backwards from the ceremony:

1. Ceremony date — fixed.
2. Shipping and customs window — leaves a delivery deadline.
3. Packing and sorting — build in time for labelled sorting, which is a manual step.
4. Production — starts only after artwork approval.
5. Sampling and proofing — this is where the calendar is usually lost.

The critical rule is that design proofing should finish well before entry close. Entry numbers determine quantities, and divisions determine the award set. If divisions are finalised after entries close, the sorting specification changes at the last minute, and packing becomes a scramble.

For recurring events, keep the previous year’s artwork and ribbon layout on file. Reordering then becomes a confirmation of quantity and date rather than a new design project.

A receiving checklist for a metal award order

When the cartons arrive, a short structured check catches almost everything before it reaches the podium. Pull five to ten pieces per category from different positions in the carton — not all from the top layer — and inspect them together.

• Plating consistency across the batch. Look for colour drift between pieces and for uneven coverage on rims, edges and recesses. Check under the same light for every piece.
• Colour fill accuracy against the approved proof. Small text and thin lines are where fill errors appear first.
• Relief definition on the smallest details. If a mascot’s features or a crest’s fine lines are soft on the sample, they will be soft across the run.
• Ribbon print alignment and stitching. Check that the printed logo is centred, straight and correctly oriented, and that the stitching or join is secure.
• Attachment security. Test the loop and the joint between ribbon and medal; this is the point that fails first in use.
• Edge finishing. Run a finger around the rim for burrs or sharp edges, particularly on cast pieces.
• Per-category counts and labels. Confirm the bag counts against the packing list and confirm the labels match your results sheet wording.

Do one check at arm’s length — the podium-photograph test — and one under close light. If those two views hold up across the sample, the batch is sound. If a category fails, check that category across several cartons before concluding anything, since damage in transit tends to be localised rather than spread evenly.

Getting the specification right at the front — the medal or medallion decision, the metal and plating, the relief, the ribbon system and the sorting instructions — is what makes the difference between an award that photographs well and distributes cleanly, and one that creates problems on the day.

If you are preparing medals for a race, a school sports day or an award ceremony, or building a recognition programme across several years, you can Get a Quote and send your artwork, quantities and ribbon requirements. You can also reach the team at sales@yichico.com or on WhatsApp +86 13585719693.