The unique role and training of K-9 units give them a distinct personality focusing on the training and partnership between police dogs and their handlers.
What responsibilities does your K-9 unit fulfill? Police dogs and their handlers are trained to work together as a team to fulfill many responsibilities including searching for illegal substances, pursuing fleeing suspects, tracking individuals, finding missing persons and detecting dangerous materials. If there’s a specific specialty or a unique role your team of handlers and canines take pride in, look for ways to represent that in your design. 
How do you plan on using your challenge coins? Think about why you’ve decided to get challenge coins for your K-9 unit. Are you looking to build team unity? Planning on using the coins for fundraising in the local community? Honoring specific canines and their handlers for outstanding service to the community? Part of the brainstorming process is answering these questions and then finding ways to reflect that in a design. A coin you design to remember a retired police dog will vary greatly in the design elements from a challenge coin designed to help raise money for your organization's charity drive for a dog shelter. 
What does the unit say? One of the best ways to help define what symbols or aspects of your K-9 unit are most important for a design is to simply check with your K-9 unit and crowdsource what aspects of their work or symbols they take the most pride in. From a unique slogan or in-joke around the department to unique law enforcement situations they’ve had to deal with, simply asking around can be the best way to find what's most important around the station. For example, a coin we designed for the Dallas Police K-9 Squad features not only an image of one of their trained german shepherds but also includes the unit specific slogan, "Committed to all, loyal to one." Adding the slogan helps define their coin as specifically recognizing the Dallas Police K-9 Unit meaningfully identifies the coin as distinctly their unit coin. 
Incorporating a station’s dogs into a challenge coin is as simple as sending us images of an organization’s police dogs and asking us to make it happen. As easy as it is, choosing to depict the actual dogs K-9 officers work with every day makes a K-9 coin a much more personal manifestation of your unit’s identity. If you choose to feature an image of an actual dog on your coin, we recommend going for a 3D coin design to better bring life to a dog’s image. As you can tell from CPD coin example, it's entirely possible to create interesting representations of a police dog even without 3D. However, going 3D creates a much more realistic depiction of the dog and it’s one of the most popular additions from our previous K-9 unit customers.
Depicting images of K-9 police dogs aren’t an organization’s only means of honoring the partnership between police dogs and their handlers. Some K-9 units prefer more subtle representations of their unit’s bond with their animals, such as designs incorporating a dog’s pawprint or teeth. In some cases, customers might even send images of an actual casting of a police dog’s pawprint to reference their canine partners. Choosing a cut-to-shape coin may be better because the option allows you to change a coin’s design to any shape or look you might want. From paw prints to police badges, choosing to cut-to-shape a coin allows customers to capture the identity of their organization through the physical shape of the coin itself.Getting Started With Police Challenge Coins, Only you and your fellow police officers know what exact aesthetic or coin type is best for representing...
Whether your department has created a fully-rendered sketch of a design or you have a few ideas but no idea how to put them on paper, All About Coins...
Challenge coins are more than just a token of appreciation - they bring people together. Whether it's in the military, sports teams, universities or...