Print ID badges, one per person, many to a sheet

Whatever your holder takes, and the only way to know that is to measure the inside of one. The safest default is 85.6 × 54 mm, which is the ID-1 format in ISO/IEC 7810 — the same size as a bank card or a Malaysian MyKad — because that is the size the plastic card holders sold with lanyards are moulded for. A7 at 105 × 74 mm is the other genuinely standard option, from the ISO 216 paper series, and it is the one size on this page you can verify by folding an A4 sheet in half three times. The 100 × 70 mm preset is a size event badge inserts are widely sold in, but it is not a published standard and this page does not pretend otherwise. If your holder is none of these, type the two measurements in: take about a millimetre off each side of what you measured, because a card cut to the exact internal dimension is a press fit that creases when you push it in.

It survives, but plan for where the slot goes. A slot punch cuts a short horizontal slot close to the top edge of the card, and punches vary, so measure yours rather than trusting a number. What matters for the design is that the top eight to ten millimetres of the card are effectively unusable — anything printed there is either cut through or hidden behind the fold of the lanyard clip. On this page that strip is exactly where the header band sits, so if you are punching slots rather than dropping the cards into holders, either switch the header off, or accept that the event name will be interrupted. There is a better answer for paper badges: put them in a plastic sleeve. Paper punched and hung directly on a lanyard tears at the slot within a day of being pulled on, and a sleeve costs less than reprinting the set.

A badge is read at about a metre, in two seconds, by somebody who is deciding whether they should walk over and say hello. That gives you three lines. The name, set as large as it will go, because it is the only thing anyone is reading it for. The role, in small letterspaced capitals, because that is what tells a stranger whether this is the person they need. And the organisation, if there is more than one in the room. Anything else — a phone number, a job grade, a mission statement — is being read by nobody at that distance and is stealing size from the name. Two specific notes. Use the name people actually go by rather than the formal one on the payroll system, since the badge exists to be spoken. And if the room is a conference with several kinds of attendee, the useful signal is what the role line says: Speaker, Crew, Volunteer, Press. That distinction does more work than colour-coding, and it still works in a photograph or for someone who cannot easily tell your colours apart.

It depends on what the badge is for, and it is worth deciding rather than defaulting. A photo is doing real work when the badge is an access credential — a site pass, a contractor badge, a school visitor badge — because the entire point is that somebody can check the face against the card. A photo does very little on a conference badge, where nobody is verifying anything and the wearer is standing right there; there the space is better spent on a larger name. There is also a cost to collecting them: a photo of a person is personal data, and gathering thirty of them for a two-day event means you now hold thirty photographs you have to decide what to do with afterwards. That is part of why this tool never writes photos to storage — they exist only in the tab you are working in. If you do use photos, a plain head-and-shoulders shot against an uncluttered background works far better at 22 mm than a cropped group photo, because at that size all a viewer gets is the shape of a head.

Yes, as an image, and deliberately not as something this page generates. Make the code on the QR generator on this site, save it as a PNG, and upload it to the person it belongs to — each badge can carry its own, so unique check-in codes work. The reason there is no encoder built into this page is size: the QR encoder on this site is hand-written rather than installed because the smallest library available is about a tenth of this site's entire JavaScript budget, and shipping a second copy of that inside the badge maker would pay the cost twice for exactly the same output. Two practical points if you do. Codes are uploaded as PNG and kept as PNG here, because JPEG compression softens the edges of high-contrast squares and that is precisely what a scanner needs to be sharp. And test one printed badge with a phone before you print the set — a code that scans on a screen can fail on paper if it has been printed too small or the printer is low on toner.

Add sixty rows and print. The grid is calculated from your card size — nine ID-1 badges fit an A4 sheet in portrait, four A7 — and the list simply carries on to the next sheet when one fills up, so sixty ID-1 badges come out as seven sheets. Cut marks print just outside the block on every sheet, aligned with each trim line including the ones shared between neighbouring badges: line a ruler or a guillotine up between two marks and one cut trims both badges either side of it. Two things make the run go better. Print one sheet, cut one badge, and put it in a holder before you print the other six — the check takes a minute and catches the print-dialog scaling problem, which is invisible until you hold the card against the sleeve. And if you have latecomers, add them at the end of the list rather than in alphabetical position, so the sheets you have already cut stay valid and you only print the last one again.

For badges going into plastic holders, ordinary paper is fine and light card is better — the holder is doing the protecting, and a stiff card is easier to slide in without creasing the corner. For badges that will be handled directly, use the heaviest card your printer takes; the maximum media weight is in the printer's manual, and a rear or straight-through paper path handles thicker stock than a tray that bends the sheet around a roller. Laminating is worth it for a badge that has to last months rather than days, with one warning that catches people out: laminating pouches add a sealed border of a few millimetres on every side, so cut the card to leave room for that or the pouch will crop your design. If you are laminating, cut the cards first, laminate individually, and then trim the pouch — never laminate the uncut A4 sheet, because you cannot cut a laminated sheet apart without opening the seal on every edge.

No, and picking the wrong one is a real mistake rather than a matter of taste. A business card carries contact details and is given away — it is designed to be kept by someone else, and every card in the box is identical. A badge carries identity and is worn — it is designed to be read across a room by strangers, it is one per person, and it usually never leaves the event. That is why this page is a list of people while the name card generator prints ten copies of the same card, and why a badge sets the name at roughly twice the size of a business card while carrying no phone number at all. If what you want is a card to hand out, the name card generator is the better page: it does 90 × 54 mm and 85 × 55 mm, front and back, and it explains bleed and safe areas for commercial printing.

The design and the list of people — names, roles and organisations — are kept in this browser's local storage as you work, because typing thirty names is real work and closing a tab should not cost you an afternoon. It stays on your device and is never sent anywhere; there is no server to send it to, because the whole page is static files and the sheet is drawn by your own browser. Photos and code images are different: they are held only in the page while the tab is open and are never written to storage at all. There are two reasons, and both are good ones. A photograph of a person is not the same kind of data as a name somebody typed, and the safer default for a set of faces that never agreed to anything is not to write them to disk. And thirty photographs encoded into local storage would blow past the roughly five megabyte quota, which does not fail gently — it makes every save fail, so the list of names would be lost too. The visible consequence is honest and stated on the page: after a reload the names come back and the photos do not. "Start a blank set" deletes the stored list, and so does clearing your browser data. One more note: the site serves Google ads, which are a third-party request like on any ad-supported page — they never see what you type, and they are hidden from the printed sheet.

Because your browser already makes better PDFs than a JavaScript library can, and for a badge the difference shows up in the one place it matters. A PDF library is around 40 KB of code to download and draws text as shapes rather than text, which is heavier and cannot be selected, searched or corrected. Print and choose "Save as PDF" and you get a real A4 document with real text and real vector edges, at the exact size the design says, which is what a print shop wants if you send the sheet out rather than running it yourself. It also keeps this page small, which is the reason the tools here load as fast as they do.