How to make ID cards

CR80 is the standard, and stick to it

CR80 — 85.6 × 54mm, the size of a bank card — is the ID card size. Every wallet slot, badge reel, lanyard holder, slot punch and card printer in the world is built around it. Designing an ID at some other size means every accessory you buy afterwards is the wrong one.

Landscape CR80 is usual for employee cards; portrait CR80 (54 × 85.6mm) is common for student and visitor cards worn on a lanyard, for the same reason conference badges are portrait — it stays readable when the holder turns round. Pick one and use it across the organisation, or the stationery cupboard ends up holding two kinds of holder and neither is ever the one you need.

If the card is going through a plastic card printer, CR80 is not a preference. It is the only thing the machine accepts.

Real cards have rounded corners with roughly a 3mm radius. Set the corner radius on the design to match if you are trimming by hand, or use a 3mm corner rounder punch afterwards.

Photos: collecting them and what makes one usable

The photograph is the part of an ID card that does the actual work, and it is the part that arrives in the worst condition. What you want is what a passport office wants: head and shoulders, face filling most of the frame, plain even background, no hat, no sunglasses, eyes open and looking at the camera.

What you get, if you ask people to send a photo, is a cropped wedding picture with somebody else’s shoulder in it. Two things fix this cheaply. Either take the photographs yourself against a blank wall in one afternoon — an hour with a phone on a tripod covers a hundred people — or send a one-paragraph brief with two example images and send back the ones that do not follow it.

For the card itself, aim for a photo area of at least 25 × 32mm, and collect images of at least 600 × 800 pixels so they stay sharp at 300 DPI. A picture that looks fine on screen at 200 pixels wide looks like a photocopy at card size.

• Portrait crop, roughly 3:4. Square photos get cut somewhere, and it is usually the chin.
• One plain background colour. A doorway, a whiteboard or a magnolia wall all work.
• Face filling about 70 percent of the frame height.
• No flash straight into glasses, no hard side light, no hats.
• Name the files by ID number rather than IMG_4471.jpg. You will be grateful at card 150.

ID numbers, and what makes a good one

If your organisation already issues employee or student numbers, use those and stop thinking about it. If it does not, this is the moment you invent a numbering scheme you will live with for a decade, so give it five minutes now.

A workable scheme is short, fixed length, and carries no meaning that might change. Numbers encoding a department or a start year become wrong the moment somebody transfers, and then you either reissue the card or live with one that lies. Sequential numbers are boring and correct.

Print the number as text if a human will read it out, and put it in a QR code if a system will read it. Do not put a national insurance number, a social security number, a student loan reference or a date of birth on the card at all — the next section explains why.

Good:  EMP-004821       fixed length, no meaning, room for 999,999 people
Good:  2026-0482        issue year plus sequence, if you reissue annually
Bad:   SALES-JSMITH-3   breaks when Jane moves team or changes her name
Bad:   1983-07-14-JS    that is a date of birth with extra steps

What belongs on an ID card, and what is a liability

An ID card answers one question: is this person who they say they are, and are they entitled to be here. Anything that does not serve that question is either clutter or risk, and a surprising amount of it is risk. The card leaves the building every day and gets dropped, photographed and left on desks.

The test to apply to each field is simple enough. If this card were lying on a train seat, would this line help a stranger do something they should not be able to do. A name and a photograph, no. A home address and a date of birth, yes — between them that is most of what somebody needs to open an account in that person’s name.

• Yes: photograph, full name, organisation name and logo, role or department, ID number, expiry date.
• Usually yes: an "if found, please return to" line carrying the organisation’s address and phone number, never the cardholder’s.
• Case by case: access level or zone markings. Useful at a door, and a map for anybody who steals the card.
• No: home address, personal phone number, date of birth, national ID or social security number, emergency contact details.
• No: a signature strip nobody checks, or a printed graphic of a magnetic stripe or chip, which is a picture of security rather than security.

The lists these cards are built from — names, staff numbers, photographs — are read in your browser and never uploaded. Worth knowing before you paste a staff roster into any website, this one included.

Build the card

The layout that works, and the reason nearly every ID card in the world looks the same, is a photograph on one side, text stacked beside it, an organisation band across the top and the number and expiry along the bottom. It is conventional because somebody on a door can read it in half a second, which is the entire point.

Start from the employee ID or school ID template rather than a blank card. Both open at CR80 with the photo box, the name and the number already placed.

1. 1Open the employee ID or school ID template and confirm the size is CR80 (85.6 × 54mm).
2. 2Set the organisation name and drop your logo into the top band.
3. 3Place the photo element where the photograph goes and size it to at least 25 × 32mm.
4. 4Set the name to {{name}} and the role to {{role}}, with the name clearly the larger of the two.
5. 5Add the ID number and the expiry date as their own small text fields along the bottom.
6. 6Add a QR code if a system will read it, with a value such as the ID number or a lookup URL.
7. 7Import your list on the People tab, then click through five or six people and check the longest name and the widest photograph.

Printing: card stock and a guillotine, or a card printer

There are two honest routes. Print on 250gsm card, trim with a guillotine, round the corners and laminate — that costs the price of a ream and looks like what it is, which is entirely adequate for a school, a small office or a contractor card. Or download the PDF and send it to a bureau with a card printer, and get real PVC cards back.

What you cannot do is feed blank PVC cards through an office printer. A card printer is a different machine that prints directly onto plastic and costs more than a lot of the cards it will ever print. Below roughly 300 cards a year, a bureau is cheaper than owning one.

Either way, download the PDF rather than printing from the browser. The PDF carries real vector text at exact physical millimetres, which is what a bureau needs and what stops a browser quietly rescaling your card by four percent. Print one test card first and put it in a wallet — CR80 is unforgiving, and a card 2mm oversize does not go in the slot.

• Card stock route: 250gsm, guillotine, 3mm corner rounder, laminating pouches sized for the card.
• Bureau route: send the PDF, ask for CR80 PVC, and ask whether they want bleed added.
• Either route: print one, measure it at 85.6 × 54mm, and check it fits a wallet slot before doing the rest.
• Scaling at 100% or Actual size, always. Card size is the one dimension that has to be exact.

Lamination, holders and expiry dates

A laminating pouch adds about 0.2mm a side, stiffens the card and stops it dissolving in a coat pocket. Buy pouches made for the card size rather than cutting A4 pouches down: a laminated edge that has been cut through starts peeling within a month. Punch the slot after laminating, not before.

A badge reel or a lanyard holder keeps the card off the floor. If you punch the slot yourself, punch the short edge for portrait cards and the long edge for landscape ones, and keep 4mm between the punch and any printing.

Put an expiry date on every card even if nobody is checking it today. A card with no expiry is valid forever, including for the person who left two years ago and never handed it back. A scheduled reissue is also the cheapest way to keep the photographs looking like the people carrying them.

• Print the expiry as a month and year — "Valid to 08/2028" — rather than a full date. Nobody revokes access on a Tuesday.
• Align expiry with something you already do: the school year, the contract term, the annual review.
• Keep the CSV you printed from. Reissuing forty cards next year is ten minutes if you still have it and an afternoon if you do not.
• Have a written process for a lost card: void the number, issue a new one, and never reuse the old number.