How to make name badges

Start with the holder, not the badge

If you have already bought pouches, clips or lanyards, the holder decides the badge size and there is nothing left to debate. Take one out of the packet and measure the window — the clear area, not the outside of the plastic. Badge card is usually cut a millimetre or two larger than the window so it does not slide about, which is why a badge printed exactly to the window size looks loose in it.

If you have not bought anything yet, 3 × 2in (76.2 × 50.8mm) is the default for a meeting or a workshop and the size most bulk pouches are made for. The one to watch is 3.5 × 2.25in: it is the other common holder size, it looks identical to 3 × 2in in a product photo, and the two are not interchangeable.

• 3 × 2in (76.2 × 50.8mm) — the standard clip-on badge. Ten to a sheet, fits the cheapest pouches.
• 3.5 × 2.25in (88.9 × 57.15mm) — slightly larger. Check the packet, because it is easy to confuse with 3 × 2in.
• 4 × 3in (101.6 × 76.2mm) — a name you can read across a room. Workshops and trade stands.
• 3 × 4in (76.2 × 101.6mm) — portrait, for lanyards. The conference default.
• 4 × 6in (101.6 × 152.4mm) — large portrait, for staff who need to be found from a distance.
• CR80 credit-card (85.6 × 54mm) — bank card size, for anything that lives in a wallet.
• A6 (105 × 148mm) — table place cards and delegate folders rather than worn badges.

Custom sizes are there too, in millimetres or inches, if you are matching something you already own and none of the presets is close.

Decide what goes on the badge, and what to leave off

A name badge has one job: let a stranger use your name without having to ask for it. Everything on the badge that is not the name competes with the name for attention, so each extra line has to earn its place.

For most events three lines is the ceiling — the name, one line saying who they are, and nothing. A logo can sit at the top or the bottom and stay small. If you are tempted to add a fourth line, ask what somebody would do with it in the two seconds they spend looking at a badge.

• Always: the name the person actually goes by. "Kate", not "Katherine J. Whitfield-Moore", unless the badge doubles as an ID.
• Usually: one qualifier — company at a mixed event, department at an internal one, table number at a dinner.
• Sometimes: pronouns, a dietary flag, a first-time attendee marker. One of these, not all three.
• Rarely: a phone number or an email address. A badge is worn in public and photographed by strangers all day.
• Never: a home address, a date of birth, or anything you would not want visible in a group photo.

Type sizes that read from two metres

Text is comfortable to read at roughly 250 times its cap height, and cap height is about 70 percent of the point size. That arithmetic gives 30pt for two metres and around 48pt for three, which is why a good conference badge looks absurdly large in your hand and is perfectly legible on the person standing opposite you.

On a 3 × 2in badge, set the name at 28–32pt and the second line at 10–12pt. On a 3 × 4in portrait badge there is room for 44–60pt. The gap between the two sizes matters as much as the sizes themselves: if the name is two points larger than the company, the eye has to read both to work out which is which.

Set the name to shrink to fit so a long name cannot overflow its box. It reduces its own size until it fits, down to a floor of 5pt. That floor exists so text never disappears entirely, but 5pt is unreadable at any distance, so treat a name that has shrunk anywhere near it as a sign the box is too small rather than a problem solved.

Font choice is Sans, Serif or Mono — Helvetica, Times and Courier. The list is short on purpose: those three print identically from the PDF on any machine because they need no embedding.

Build the badge

The Design tab puts elements down the left, the badge in the middle and the settings for whatever you have selected on the right. Click an element to change it, drag it to move it, drag a corner to resize it. Undo and redo cover the drags that go wrong.

Start from a template rather than an empty rectangle. The simple name tag template already has the name box sized and centred, which is the fiddly part.

1. 1Open a template and set the badge size on the right to match the holders you measured.
2. 2Click the name text and check it reads {{name}} — that is the variable replaced per person.
3. 3Set the font, size and weight for the name, then do the same for the second line.
4. 4Add a logo with the image element and scale it down until it stops competing with the name.
5. 5Add a background colour or a coloured band if you want one, and a corner radius if your holders have rounded windows.
6. 6Use the alignment controls to straighten a row of elements — it is faster and more accurate than dragging.

Add your people

The People tab is a table. For a handful of names, use Add person and type them in; for twenty people that is genuinely quicker than opening a spreadsheet.

For a list you already have, use Import CSV. The importer reads the first row as headers, guesses which column is the name and which is the company, and shows a preview before anything is added. Columns you do not want on the badge get set to "Don’t import".

Either way, click a person in the table and the canvas shows their badge. That is the fastest check you have — click the longest name in the list and watch what happens to the type.

Print the sheet

The Print tab lays your badges out on paper. Choose US Letter or A4, portrait or landscape, then set the margins, the gap between badges, and how many fit per row and column. Crop marks put short lines outside each badge so you have something to cut against.

Print one page before you print thirty. Hold it against a holder, check the size and the evenness of the margins, and only then run the rest. A test page costs one sheet of card; a full run at the wrong scale costs the box.

• Set printer scaling to 100% or Actual size. Fit to page shrinks everything by three to five percent.
• Turn on background graphics, or coloured areas print as white paper with text on it.
• Download PDF gives vector text at exact physical millimetres, which is what a print shop wants.
• Download PNG gives one badge at 300 DPI, for a screen, a slide or a single sticker.

What usually goes wrong

Five things account for almost every re-print, and all five are visible before you commit paper if you know to look for them.

• The badge does not fit the holder — the printer scaled the page, or the size was set to the outside of the pouch rather than the window.
• The name is unreadable at arm’s length — it is under 24pt, or a long name has shrunk to fit a box that was always too small.
• Every badge shows the same name — two CSV columns were mapped to the same field on the import screen.
• A coloured band printed white — background graphics was off in the print dialog.
• Your work has vanished — projects are saved on this device only, so a different browser or a cleared cache means starting again. Download the PDF as soon as you are happy with it.