How to make conference badges

Size, orientation and the lanyard

Portrait 3 × 4in (76.2 × 101.6mm) is the conference default, and it is the default for a physical reason: a badge on a lanyard rotates. A landscape badge that has spun round shows a blank back at chest height all afternoon. A portrait badge in a double-clip lanyard, or printed on both sides, stays readable whichever way it lands.

The top 15 to 20mm of a portrait badge is dead space — it sits behind the pouch seam and the punched hole. Put the event logo there, or nothing, but do not put anything you need to read there. 4 × 6in gives a much larger badge for crew or for a big hall; 3 × 2in landscape is a meeting badge and reads as one at a conference.

• 3 × 4in portrait (76.2 × 101.6mm) — the standard. Fits the pouches every conference supplier stocks.
• 4 × 6in portrait (101.6 × 152.4mm) — large format, for staff and crew who need to be findable across a hall.
• A6 (105 × 148mm) — close to 4 × 6in and convenient if you are cutting down from A4.
• Leave the top 15–20mm clear of anything that has to be read.

What goes on the badge

The name, as large as the badge allows and in the form the person actually uses. Then the organisation. Then, if the event genuinely needs it, one more line. The hierarchy should be obvious at a glance: a name at 48pt over a company at 14pt reads instantly, while a name at 20pt over a company at 16pt makes people squint at both to work out which is which.

A large first name over a smaller full name is worth considering for a networking event — "Sarah" at 54pt with "Sarah Okonjo" at 16pt beneath it. It is not how you would set a business card, but the first name is what somebody needs when they decide to walk over.

Everything else — the schedule, the wifi password, the venue map, the sponsor wall — goes on the back. There is a whole side of card there and nobody is reading it while you are talking to them.

• Name — 44–60pt on a 3 × 4in badge. {{name}}.
• Company or organisation — 14–18pt. {{company}}.
• Role, only where the audience is mixed enough for it to mean something. {{role}}.
• Attendee type — speaker, staff, sponsor, press. Colour does this better than words do.
• Pronouns, if your event has decided to carry them. Small, directly under the name.

Colour-coding attendee types

Somebody scanning a room needs to know who is staff in half a second, and a printed word does not do that at three metres. Colour does. A band across the top or bottom of the badge, or a full background, separates crew from speakers from attendees at a distance where no text is legible at all.

Keep it to three or four colours and make them differ in lightness as well as hue, so they still separate for the roughly one man in twelve with a colour vision deficiency, and in photographs. Print the role word as well, at 12pt or so: the colour does the fast job and the word does the unambiguous one.

In practice this is one short run per type. Duplicate the design, change the band colour and the role word, import that group’s list, print. Four attendee types is four short runs, not four times the work.

• Attendee — your base colour, whatever the event branding is.
• Speaker — a strong, distinct colour. These are the people others are trying to find.
• Staff and crew — the most visible colour you have. This is the badge people look for when something has gone wrong.
• Sponsor or exhibitor — separate again, so exhibitors can recognise each other.
• Press and volunteers, if you have them and they are not covered by staff.

QR codes: what they should encode

A QR code is only worth its space if somebody has a reason to scan it and something that reads it. The editor prints the code; whatever reads it afterwards is your own system, or a phone camera pointed at a URL. Decide what happens after the scan before you put one on 400 badges.

The two that actually get used are a link to the attendee’s own ticket or profile, and a link that lets another attendee save their details. Both are just URLs, and QR values take variables, so a single design produces a different code per person.

Keep the URL short. A code holding 40 characters has a coarse pattern that scans from across a table; the same code holding a 300-character vCard has a dense pattern that needs a bigger print and a steadier hand. If you want contact exchange, point the code at a short page rather than stuffing a vCard into it. Print the code at least 20mm square and leave a few millimetres of clear space around it.

https://yourevent.com/a/{{ticket_id}}      per-person link, short enough to scan across a table
https://yourevent.com/schedule            the same on every badge, no variable needed
WIFI:S:EventGuest;T:WPA;P:welcome2026;;   joins the venue wifi, good on the back of the badge

Printing in batches as registrations come in

Do not wait for a final list, because there is not going to be one. Export what you have three weeks out and print those, then export the new registrations each week and print only those. Sorting each batch alphabetically into boxes as you go turns the pick-up desk from a scramble into a filing job.

Each run is a fresh import, so the record of what you have already printed has to live in your own spreadsheet — a "printed" column you fill in as you go is enough. The editor has no memory of last week’s run, and that is easier to work with than a system that thinks it knows.

1. 1Export the registrations you have not yet printed as a CSV.
2. 2Import it, check the preview, and print that batch.
3. 3Mark those rows as printed in your own spreadsheet.
4. 4Sort the printed badges alphabetically by surname into boxes, splitting the boxes as they fill.
5. 5Repeat weekly, then do a final run the day before for anything that came in late.

Keep the last exported CSV somewhere you can find it. Projects are saved on this device only, so the CSV is what lets you rebuild the run on a different machine.

Walk-ups, corrections and blanks

Roughly one badge in twenty gets remade on the day: a misspelling, a job change, a name somebody would rather not have printed, and the people who registered at the door. Plan for it and it is a non-event; do not, and it is the first hour of your conference.

Print a stack of blanks — the badge design with no name on it — and bring a good permanent marker. A hand-written name on a well-designed badge looks deliberate; a printed name that is wrong does not. If you have a laptop and a printer on site, keep the project open on the desk and print singles, but do not depend on venue wifi or a venue printer for it.

• Ten percent more blanks than you think you need, plus spare pouches and lanyards.
• A black marker with a chisel tip. Ballpoint on card is invisible at two metres.
• The PDF on a USB stick as well as on the laptop, in case the laptop is the thing that fails.
• A written list of who you reprinted, so the collection boxes do not end up holding two of the same person.

Double-sided badges

The back of a badge is free space and the one place a schedule is genuinely useful. Put the agenda, the wifi details, the venue map or the emergency number there, and keep the front to name, organisation and role.

The mechanics: build the back as a second design at the same size, print all the fronts, reload the stack and print the backs. Test on two sheets first, because printers disagree about which way a stack goes back in, and a front-to-back offset of 2mm reads as a manufacturing fault. Registration is never exact, so keep the back’s content 5mm clear of the trim edge.

The lazier option, and a perfectly good one, is a double-window pouch: print two badges per person, slide both in back to back, and skip duplex entirely. Twice the card, none of the registration problem.