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Employee ID card maker
Credit-card sized staff IDs with a photo and an employee number, made and printed on your own machine.
No signup. No watermark. Your data never leaves your browser.
About the employee id card maker
A staff ID card is 85.6 × 54 mm, the same as a bank card, because that is the size wallets, badge holders, slot punches and card printers are all built around. Get that right and every accessory you buy afterwards fits without an argument.
The card carries a photo, a name, a department and an employee number. The photo is what makes it an ID rather than a name badge: it is the thing a receptionist checks against a face. Photos you add are read by the browser, stay on your computer, and are embedded in the PDF generated there — they are never uploaded and never appear in analytics.
For a handful of people, print onto card stock and cut. For a few hundred, or for cards that have to survive a year on a lanyard reel, download the PDF and hand it to whoever runs a card printer.
Your badge data stays in your browser. Names, spreadsheets and photos are never uploaded, and never reach any analytics. Your work is saved on this device only.
Start here
Templates for this
Each one opens in the editor with the fields already set up. Change anything you like.
What goes on an employee ID card
- Photo
{{photo}} - The whole point of an ID. Head and shoulders, face filling most of the frame, plain background. A group photo cropped down to one person never looks right and never checks cleanly.
- Name
{{name}} - The full name, as payroll has it. This is a record rather than a friendly tag, so no nicknames and no shortened surnames.
- Employee number
{{employee_id}} - The one field that has to be exactly right. It is what somebody reads down the phone when they have locked themselves out or lost the card.
- Department
{{department}} - Tells a receptionist which floor and which manager. More durable than a job title, which changes more often than the card does.
- Expires
{{expires}} - A date turns a card into something that stops working. Without one, an ID that never got handed back at the end of a notice period still looks entirely valid.
Anything in double braces is filled in per person. Put {{name}} on the badge once and it becomes every name on your list.
How it works
Four steps, and none of them is signing up.
- 1
Start from the CR80 card
85.6 × 54 mm landscape, the standard credit-card size. Do not round it to 86 × 54 — holders and slot punches are cut to the exact dimension.
- 2
Import the staff list, then add the photos
A CSV fills in names, numbers and departments in one pass. Photos are attached per person, so work through the list in the same order as your image files and check each face against the name.
- 3
Set one expiry date for the batch
Pick a date everyone shares — the end of the calendar year, the end of a contract period — rather than a date per person. Reissuing one batch a year is a job; tracking 300 individual dates is not.
- 4
Print onto card, or send the PDF to a card printer
For a few, print at 100% onto 250–300 gsm card and cut with a corner rounder. For a batch, download the PDF and give it to whoever runs the card printer.
CR80 cards, card printers, and the photo
CR80 is the ISO card size: 85.6 × 54 mm, or 3.37 × 2.13 inches. It is the size of a bank card and of every plastic ID you have ever been handed. Card printers, slot punches, lanyard clips, wallet windows and door-access holders are all built to it, which is why it is worth matching exactly rather than approximately.
There are two ways to actually make the card. A card printer prints onto blank PVC cards and gives you something that survives a year of being sat on; if your workplace has one, hand over the PDF, and if it does not, a print shop that does ID cards will take the same file. Otherwise print onto 250–300 gsm card stock, cut it out, and put it in a rigid holder. That costs nothing extra and is fine for a small team, but bare card goes soft at the corners within a month, so laminate it or hold it.
For the photo: head and shoulders against a plain wall, the face filling most of the frame, the eyes about two thirds of the way up. Photograph everyone in the same place on the same day if you can. A set of ID cards where each photo has a different background and a different crop looks less like a set of IDs and more like a set of forgeries, and it makes them slower to check.
Keep the layout conservative. The photo and the name are the card. The number, the department and the date are supporting text at around 7 to 8 points, and anything decorative is competing with the face, which is the only thing anyone is really looking at.
- CR80 landscape, 85.6 × 54 mm (3.37 × 2.13 in): the standard staff card
- CR80 portrait, 54 × 85.6 mm: the same card rotated, for lanyards
- 250–300 gsm card stock for a small team, in a rigid holder or laminated
- Photos: plain background, head and shoulders, everyone shot the same way
ID card sizes
| Badge | Size | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| CR80 landscape | 3.37 × 2.13 in · 85.6 × 54 mm | The standard staff ID. Fits wallets, badge holders and card printers. |
| CR80 portrait | 2.13 × 3.37 in · 54 × 85.6 mm | The same card rotated, for lanyards with a slot punch at the top. |
| Clip-on ID | 3.5 × 2.25 in · 88.9 × 57.15 mm | Larger than a card and easier to read at a distance, but it will not fit a wallet. |
| Contractor pass | 3 × 4 in · 76.2 × 101.6 mm | Portrait lanyard badge for people on site for a week rather than a year. |
Blank PVC cards are sold as CR80, so the size matches with nothing to work out. If you are printing onto card stock instead, turn crop marks on and cut just inside them.
Questions
Where to next
Make your employee id card now
The editor opens straight away. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.