Chip Design Notes

This is all just my opinion, yet I’m writing this in third person. It feels weird but it will survive your edits better. —ts4z

Material

We generally make ceramic chips.

“Clay”¹ chips, particularly Paulson chips, are prized for their weight, great colors, and the way they play a little better as they break in. Unfortunately, Paulson has not sold to the home market since the mid 2000’s.

The 1993 BARGE chips were made by ASM, now known as Classic Poker Chips. ASM has a corporate history going back to the beginning of chips. Tim has a large cash set that ASM produced. These are nice chips, but they feel different than Paulson. They are also more expensive, have inconsistent thicknesses, require a longer lead time, are less flexible, and of this writing, are moving their factory and not currently taking orders.

Our vendor for our last several sets is BRPro Poker. We’re very happy with them. They have done all the 2025 chips as well as a few previous chips sets, chips for PeterBARGE, and some other chips for Tim.

“Inlay” Design

In the beginning, chips were typically “clay”¹ and would have, at most, a modest center design in a 7/8" inlay centered in a textured clay disc.

In the 1990s, CHIPCO made the first ceramic chips, which allowed designs right out to the edge.

Paulson, the dominant maker of casino clay chips, countered by making “grand inlay” chips. These include chips like the 1998 and 1999 BARGE chips. These combine the advantages of clay chips (better handling and wear) with the graphic flexibility of ceramic chips.

Though we have complete freedom in printing, we have found we like our chips better when they have an outer ring of color, centered by a design or logo.

We have steered away from “grand” style inlays for a clear reason: they just don’t play well. Having a clear color on the outside of the chip face makes it easier to distinguish chips.

Color

We spent a lot of time worrying about chip colors. A common problem in many BARGE chip designs is that some colors, notably red and orange, or red and pink, can be too close.

This is apparent on the 2019 (ADBBINGO) chips, and somewhat more apparent on the 2025 chips between the pink and orange chips. Several of the older sets also suffer from this problem.

Patrick’s suggestion is to print the test design on paper, in black & white, and make sure they look different enough to be able to tell them apart in less-than-ideal light.

Our vendor (BRPro) does not supply exact color matching. (They aren’t terrible, they just don’t get that close.) So it is all the more important to stay far apart.

Printing Tolerances

BRPro uses a dye-sublimation process. Here is a video of someone performing that process on chip blanks.

We have some observations about how this process has worked for us.

Edge of the Face

BRPro allows printing all the way to the edge of a chip (old CHIPCO chips required a white ring on the edge). But they are not exact in their positioning. BRPro claims their chips do not need a “bleed” at the chip edges. This is technically true, but the design will not be well-aligned to the edge. A little shifting is inevitable, and became evident on some test prints that went a little close to the edge.

Tim ordered a couple dealer buttons from BRPro, intended to have a 1mm border around a graphic with a hard outer circle edge. BRPro’s tolerances are such that this was just 0.5mm off. It stands out. If the graphic had a softer outer edge, these flaws would not be apparent.

A good workaround is to make sure anything very close to the edge does not track the edge exactly. On Tim’s 2025 chips, the “BARGE XXXV” text is far enough from the chip edge that it was not a problem. But the denominations on the back do not follow the curve, and proofs showed that some of the near-edge denominations clipped at the edge of the chip.

Blur of Dye-Sublimation

The dye sub process tends to blur sharp lines slightly. This is not very noticeable in photographs. Thin black lines become slightly thicker. Colors bleed into whites.

Black and dark colors

Bright and simple is advised.

The thinner the black outline, the better.

Our “Fabulous” BARGE logo looks OK on chips, but the black outline of the light bulbs blurs and the bulbs are lost. We simplify this logo.

On the PeterBARGE 2025 chips, we have a picture of a pinball machine. This machine has illustrations of playing cards with lots of fine black-line art. This turns into something of a muddy mess.

Text

Patrick likes Arial for text on chips. It replicates well with the dye sub process.

Tim insisted on Futura for his chips. He’s happy with it, but you might not be.

Thin line weights will get lost in the blur.

Make Proofs of BRPro Chips

We learned in 2025 that making proof chips was key. We identified a number of problems. This is particularly important if you haven’t printed chips before.

Software

Tim’s advice: Pony up and buy Illustrator for a few months.

Tim used Inkscape (which is open source/free software) for some prototypes. It had some glitchy habits when printing, but it did help bash out some of the original ideas.

Patrick gained some experience with Affinity Designer, but it’s not what the vendor uses, and it lacks some features that Illustrator has.

Working with BRPro

BRPro was able to generate an invoice that split our 2025 order into two shippable units, one to Nevada and one to Tim in California. This was convenient and shipping was much easier, and we didn’t have to pay California taxes on the whole thing.