Creating badges with the Document Designer – How can we help?

What is a badge? A Badge is a printed document worn by visitors (e.g. on a lanyard around their necks) for the duration of an event. It is generally printed on the day of the event, when the visitor shows up at the entrance with a registration voucher. You can design a badge to include your company logo, registrants name, registration type, etc.

Badges are the most common type of document designed in the Document Designer. They are created in the same way as any other kind of document. This means you can follow the instructions in Basic Document Designer functions and Advanced Document Designer functions to do most of what you need to do. Nevertheless, there are some special things to keep in mind when designing badges.

Before you begin designing a badge for your event, you should think about the information that will be useful to have to hand on the day of the event – not just for you, but for your visitors and exhibitors as well. For example, here are some things you should consider:

Do you want to restrict access to certain areas for certain kinds of visitors? If so, you might want to incorporate the #registration_type# dynamic field into your badge design, so that each visitor’s Registration Type is displayed on their badge (see Using dynamic field values in the Document Designer).
Are your exhibitors planning to collect contact details and lead data from visitors at your event? If so, you might want to add a barcode and/or QR code to the badge for them to scan (see Using barcodes and QR codes in the Document Designer).

After you have created a badge design, you can choose to print your badges at two different times:

all at once, before the event, from the Service Centre tab (see Generate (Badge) documents);
one by one, at the event, using an EventBox that is set up in Scan & Go mode (see Using the EventBox).

Alternatively, you can send your registrants a link to their badge, so that they can download it and print it themselves. This is known as an e-Badge. The link can be added to a mail by inserting the dynamic field #link_document: <document name>#. See Dynamic Fields Dynamic Fields for more information.

You do not necessarily need to have your badges printed and ready before you open the event registration. As long as the badge is ready before the start date of your event, you are still on time.