How to Design and Personalize Conference Badges?

What does it take to prepare event badges? What should they contain? How does one personalize them? But let’s go back to the very beginning. The process of preparing appropriate badges for attendees of a conference or congress can be divided into three stages:

1. Selecting the size of a badge

Depending on the nature of an event, the method adopted to print badges, and the material used to produce them, we must choose the appropriate size.

2. Preparing the graphic design

We must ask ourselves a fundamental question when working on that particular issue: what is an event badge? Well, it is, first and foremost, a medium with information about the attendee. Its graphic design – like graphic designs for all other types of mediums – must be a packaging for its content. The priorities one adopts when designing an ID badge can be narrowed down to a couple of items:

• Information about the attendee and a QR/barcode (provided that we are using an application for electronic identification of attendees),
• Name of the event, its date, location, and the logotype of the event,
• Logotypes of event partners,
• Branding that will decorate the design should emphasize the content mentioned above.

The design of a conference badge (just as any other material to be printed) must contain an embedded 300dpi bitmap, or be based on a vector graphic image, which is both lightweight and scalable to any size without losing its quality.

When preparing a professional design, the best option is to use tools recommended by experts, such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW.

3. Personalization of conference badges

There are two ways of carrying out this stage:

If you own a suite of Adobe applications, you can use the function offered by InDesign, which allows the user to personalize content in an indicated block of text, based on a .CSV file containing attendee records. It is not particularly complicated but requires good knowledge of the Adobe suite and you certainly need to... own the product. Unfortunately, this tool is very expensive.

The other method consists in using the PDF creator module of CONREGO event registration software to personalize conference badges. Thanks to the functionality of this module, we can easily prepare a template based on a graphic design and use it as a background to embed data fields corresponding to attendees which you intend to personalize. This way, we can create a template and use it to generate multi-page PDF files for all attendees that can be printed at any print house.

You can use CONREGO not only to design badges, but also to prepare passes, certificates, and other documents that require personalization. By combining the PDF creator module and event mailings, you can send all of the mentioned types of documents by email. See how easy it is by registering a 14-day free trial account!

Łukasz Krawczuk