pedal to the (fiesta) medal

Pride in ‘Puro’ San Antonio culture reaches fever pitch during Fiesta each spring. Fiesta means party, of course, and the festival has evolved into a city-wide confetti of events, from parades to pageants and galas, which celebrate our storied history, food, and cultural icons (The Spurs, y’all!).

Clever commemorative medals are one of our favorite Fiesta traditions. The ribboned trinkets are produced, traded and generally coveted by sash-wearing San Antonians. This being the 300th anniversary of the city’s founding, we knew we had to get in on the fun.

And what better way to show our SA pride, than with our very own custom TBG Fiesta Medal! Read below for an insider’s perspective of how we came up with the design which we’ll be unveiling during the Battle of the Flowers Parade on Friday, April 27th. Happy Fiesta!!!

Deciding on a Direction

Because Fiesta is such a fun time in our city, our San Antonio office held an internal medal design charrette to determine the concept for the medal. We got some really great stuff!

Sombrero + TBG

TBG + Skyline

Siesta Fiesta

TBG + Skyline

TBG Nopales

Guayabera + the Spurs

City Grid in White

Guayabera + the Spurs Option 2

King Cakes

City Grid in Black

Frederick Law Olmsted

TBG Courtyard
After much (fun) deliberation, we had consensus to explore the TBG Courtyard theme. In thinking about what makes our San Antonio office unique, medal-designer Alexander Gonzalez said, “The courtyard is a great feature at our office. And the trellis really stands out….Plus with our location on the parade route people would recognize it as they walked by.”

The next step was to flesh out the concept further.

Alex came up with several additional concepts.

Courtyard Trellis Concepts

Medal Production

Once we had a concept decided on, we moved in to figuring out how to actually produce a Fiesta medal.

Monica Griffin, our Marketing Communications Graphics Coordinator, worked with Alex to add a type treatment to his design and then sent to our vendor, The Pin People. We went through a few rounds of proofs once they generated the design for the enamel and she worked back and forth with the vendor to be sure all of the lines and colors from Alex’s original drawing were maintained as closely as possible. Once approved, production on this took 3 weeks.

We selected a solid yellow for the ribbon color as an accent to the overall color scheme and went with a standard 1.5” square size. We also requested that the medal be produced without any epoxy coating so that the finished medal would have a textured feel as opposed to a smooth one. We learned that Fiesta medal collectors prefer textured medals over smooth ones — who knew?

Apparently, they loved Alex’s design so much, they wanted to keep an image of the finished product for their records.

We don’t blame them!