Howdy bot believers,

I'm excited to share with you all that I received the bulk shipment of Short Circuit pins this week and began the process of grading and carding them!!

Behold, here's what 3050 enamel pins looks like:

And here's a short video clip showcasing one of each bot board design on their backing cards:

Springing for the laminated foil overprint on the cards was absolutely the right decision, they look absolutely gorgeous with the pins. There was a bit of a hiccup in file formatting which meant I initially received all the Earth cards without foil, so I reordered them - an extra cost, but absolutely worth it for how the whole aesthetic comes together! The new backing cards arrived within just a couple days of the pins themselves, so it all worked out.

The stickers are also on their way! Bird Bot Print Shop sent me lovely photos of the fat stacks of shiny to share with you all, and I received shipment notice yesterday.

I've also received a huge bundle of shipping boxes, and after that we're just waiting on the shiny baggies I ordered to protect the pins in style when I pack 'em up.

In the meantime, the intensive process of pin grading is underway. For those less familiar with enamel pins, grading involves checking each pin for deviations from the expected quality, also called Standard or A-grade.

Enamel pins are ultimately a handmade item, as many parts of the process such as polishing and filling in the enamel paint are not handled by machines. Thus, some small level of variation is expected and rarely are pins "perfect", but flaws such as underfills, bigger scuffs, excessive bubbling in the metal plating, incorrect color fills, or missing enamel all classify pins as Seconds, B-grade or lower.

I've finished my first pass examination of Byte (wolf) and Hex (goat) and am bummed to say the B-grade rate is much higher than expected for both. HOWEVER fear not: fortunately, I still have enough standard grade to fulfill Backerkit orders! Peep the beautiful pins above and below. <3

I've documented the issues and sent them to my manufacturer to try and arrange replacements, as I planned to have more standard grade pins for conventions and such. If for some reason I come across a design where there are not enough standard grade to fulfill orders, I will let you all know right away and contact those impacted, but I'm hopeful that our luck will hold out! I'm now about halfway through grading RAID (tiger) and so far those buddies are almost all looking amazing, which is the quality I expected.

The grading, carding, and packing for the 335 of you will be quite an undertaking, but so far we're on track to have everything sent out by the end of July as planned. I'll push more updates your way as the process progresses. Have a fantastic weekend all!

Hey robot enjoyers,

I arrive bearing a fresh project update and seeking opinions regarding the next iteration of Short Circuit!

Let's start with some previews from my sticker supplier, who is himself an artist running a small business in Canada. Just the character art sticker sheets took up a stunning 136 feet of vinyl - here they are on the roll prior to lamination and cutting:

He also showed me samples of the selective holographic stickers to confirm they all looked as intended prior to bulk production. Here's the Fire Unit Line, for a peek at that:

Pin production is humming right along as well, and every time I receive footage of the veritable robot army taking shape I feel kind of feral with excitement. BEHOLD:

Good progress all around!! I also recently ordered the backing cards, which are being produced locally so I should have them in hand well in advance of the pins.

It took some figuring to get the files set up right, but I was determined to push through it for that sweet sweet foil overprint (as previously mocked up in this update). I also got pretty intense with making certain the safety compliance information wouldn't be punctured on the back of a given set. How I did so, for your viewing enjoyment, aka the backing card backs are out here looking like survivorship bias diagrams:

Everything is coming together! ✨ The last bit of current campaign business to update on presently is that everyone should now be successfully charged, other than 9 of you whose cards are still showing up declined or errored. If that's you and you need any help getting things sorted, please feel free to email me ([email protected])!

And finally for a small announcement, if you enjoyed this series and are hungry for more designs: I plan to participate in this year's Pintober, a spooky crowdfunding collective running from October 21st to November 1st! 

The guaranteed new designs on the docket are:

🦇💜 The addition of a bat to the Air Unit Line
🕸🖤 A whole new line, the Void Unit Line, which will include a spider web design for its "elemental" pin!

I've combed through your freeform survey responses again and tallied up all the animal suggestions that repeated - attached is a poll featuring the most requested critters (or in the case of the last choice, multiple critters). Backer favorites will make it into the Spooky Circuit lineup!

More on that to come. Thank you all as ever, and have a great rest of the week!

Hey robot crew,

This past week surveys and pre-orders were locked and Backerkit should have tried to charge the cards you have on file for shipping and any remaining balances! These funds haven't hit my end yet via Stripe, but I can see that this was processed without issue for the vast majority of you. It looks like only 14 cards were declined or errored - if that's you, please be sure to get your card updated or otherwise sorted! I of course need the shipping funds in order to get these little guys into your hands.

8 of you still have not filled out your surveys. You are still able to do so, but please please complete them as soon as possible. Folks with surveys left incomplete by July will have their orders cancelled and your pledge will be considered a donation.

With the spooky timing messages out of the way, onward to the fun stuff: production on your robot friends is in motion!! Bulk orders for both the pins and stickers were placed this past week to the tune of 3050 pins and 2605 stickers. That absolutely bananas total includes everything ordered by you amazing folks, plus some generous extra across designs to make sure I have enough after pin grading, and then to bring to conventions and other events after initial fulfillment is complete!

For those curious about the behind the scenes of it all, here's a peek at how the formatting for the character art sticker sheets works:

I spent a bunch of time this past week bumping elements around gently to ensure that all the text and mini versions of the pin art could also be viable kiss cut stickers. It was important to me that you could slap "KNOWN BUGS: HOARDER" onto something if you so desired (I know I will, because this is an accurate description of me as an entity). The red line closest to the outside is the bleed border, and the rest indicate the boundaries of the stickers themselves!

The red is not printed on, just a cut guideline to communicate with my excellent sticker manufacturer.

For the selective holographic stickers, my time was mostly spent being picky about cleaning up all the little edges. The pin versions have the reality of being made of metal and enamel paint to make them look badass with just the vectored lines. The sticker versions have added raster gradients, airbrushing, and lil hand-adjusted drop shadows to give the metal and backing board the impression of depth. They also have a mask layer that indicates which portion should remain rainbow shiny vs the areas that receive opaque white ink printing.

And now for some statistics, because it's really dang interesting to see. The two items with the highest counts were of course the cross collaboration freebie, Branch, and first 48 hour freebie, Pause. Pause was also a popular add on, resulting in a total of 285 pin orders (209 were freebies to qualifying backers, so 76 additional) and 46 sticker orders. I ultimately ordered 400 Pause pins and 150 Pause stickers.

Outside of the freebies, the top three ordered pin designs were Byte (127), Malware (117), and Circat (97). The underdog pin designs with the least orders were Torrent (28) followed by Jump, Firewall, and DDoS, all tied at 37. (Leaf and Incubate were quite popular elemental designs comparatively, at 84 and 72 pin orders respectively.) The top ordered stickers were all selective holographic, RAID (51), followed by Byte and Circat tied at 48. The least ordered stickers were the Hex sticker sheet (19) and Torrent sticker sheet (20), followed by the Torrent selective holographic (21). It can be hard to predict what's going to be popular! Torrent happens to be one of my personal favorites, and I don't really mind - it's important to make the art you want to see anyway, and sometimes what doesn't perform online mysteriously does sell at in-person events. <3

Of folks who have completed the shipping address on their surveys, 237 backers and pre-order customers are from the United States. 39 are from various countries in the European Union, 25 are from the United Kingdom, 13 from Canada, 6 from Australia, and 1 from Hong Kong. Extremely cool! As an artist living and working in the Netherlands, I'd love to figure out how to reach a broader EU audience, but since my first 34 years of life were spent in the US it makes perfect sense that the majority of my audience is still there. I'm grateful to all of you for making this project a reality!!

Are there any other stats you would be interested in seeing? If so, let me know in the comments! I hope you're all having a wonderful week. ✨

Hey robot enthusiasts,

As promised - I've taken some of the individual photos my manufacturing representative sent me, and edited together an image of everyone!

A catalogue of each unit's name, from left to right, top to bottom - EARTH UNIT LINE: Byte, Circat, Nibble, Leaf, Pause, Branch. FIRE UNIT LINE: Hex, Mozzy, Cloud, RAID, Firewall. WATER UNIT LINE: Torrent, Zip, Array, DDoS. And last but certainly not least, the AIR UNIT LINE: Python, Jump, Malware, and Incubate. A few of these little guys are in perspective, but I tried to keep the images consistent in lighting across unit lines.

General reminder that the pre-order store and backer surveys will lock on Monday, May 5th. This is your final call to update your selections! 12 of you still have not completed your surveys - if you do not get those in by Monday, I cannot guarantee your choice of items and you will not be able to receive a refund.

After orders lock, you will be charged for the remaining balance on your account for any additional add-ons and shipping costs. This should occur within 2-3 days of lock down. Shipping addresses are the one detail that will remain editable up until July when fulfillment begins.

In other news, I have been accepted as a dealer for this year's upcoming Eurofurence in Hamburg, Germany in early September! If you're attending and would like to say hey and pick up some art goodies in person, my table number is slated to be B2/309. If you're a campaign backer who's planning to attend, you don't mind grabbing your pins a little later, and you'd like to save on shipping - you can pick up your Short Circuit items in person! Just email [email protected] with your backer info and I can arrange to waive your shipping costs.

Have a lovely rest of the week, all! I hope your weather is as gorgeous as ours has been here in the Netherlands over the past few days. <3