A Book on a Hook
June 11th, 2010
The search is over. Many have heroically tried. But a decisive winner has emerged.
Behold! the most elegant and usable conference badge design ever:
This badge is from The Web and Beyond 2010, held in Amsterdam two weeks ago, where I spoke and saw many excellent sessions.
Let me explain the mechanics of this great design:
Lanyard: The lanyard is nothing special — a branded ribbon with a simple clasp at the end. As far as I’m concerned, the lanyard is interchangeable. Irrelevant, in fact: you could use a metal chain, a hemp rope, whatever. That’s part of the awesomeness of this design.
Graphics: The first name is big so you can say “Hi Christopher”, and the last name and company/affiliation is a little smaller. The same information is printed on both sides. I imagine the text could be a little bigger all around for readability’s sake.
Booklet: Here’s where it gets really clever: The “name tag” is actually the cover of a little booklet. The booklet’s cover, as you can see in the picture, is printed upside-down from the contents of the booklet itself, so that the badge wearer can flip the book up to read the contents. The lanyard attaches to the booklet using “loop staples“, the same staples that hold the book together, thus requiring no additional hardware and, even better, no plastic sleeve. I’ve seen plenty of attempts to make badges with little pockets for holding a conference booklet, but this unified solution blows those ideas away.
It doesn’t hurt that the 35-page booklet contained great facilities maps, a full schedule, and biographies and photos of all the speakers. The covers were color-coded, too, with different colors for attendees, speakers, and staff.
Of course, not every conference can afford all of the bells and whistles on display with this badge design, but it’s easy to see how the basic principle — a book on a hook — can work for smaller budgets. For example, the custom-printed attendee-name covers could simply be blanks on which stickers are affixed. The booklets could be briefer, focusing on just the schedule, for example.
Conference organizers: Please steal this idea!
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your kind remarks. I was one of the volunteers on the conference team and we have put considerable effort into the design of the badge, so I’m glad to see you like it.
In the design, we were keen to minimize the effort of taking a quick glimpse at the program, so we quickly figured plastic sleeves were a no-go. We were a little concerned that this would cause the badge to wear out quickly, but that seems to have gone alright.
As for the type on the cover: here we had to accommodate for the longest names in the registration database. Unfortunately, I think that left most people with a little too much white space on the cover.
On a side note, although I don’t have the exact numbers, I think we were able to produce the badges for around 2,5 to 3 dollars each, which includes the custom lanyard.
Anyway, thanks again for mentioning the badge design and, of course, for your great talk at this year’s conference.
cheers,
by Nick van der Linde June 12th, 2010 | 5:31 amNick
Hi Chris:
Actually we did almost exactly that for our UXLx (User Experience Lisbon) Conference Badge that took place last May. You can see a picture of the front here: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4055/4631481685_e602ccd2bf_b.jpg The I’m looking for part was to put up to four stickers from some sheets we gave everyone. You can see them here amongst the entire swag we gave every attendee: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4045/4655685369_b8f9d51a42_b.jpg The idea is that people could say I’m looking for a job, love, friends, etc. There were also some design your own.
by Bruno Figueiredo June 12th, 2010 | 1:24 pmThe label as you can see puts emphasys on the first name, the last names goe below and to the write people could use the space to write their twitter handles or other stuff. Below is the name of the company and some numbers we used to check registration info for workshops for instance. The number with a black background was a surprise and was used to raffle off a lot of prizes at the end.
The badge was a Moo postcard that was then laminated and a hole punched on top. There were two identical stickers on the front and back with the persons name and on the back there was also a tiny version of the entire programme printed upside down. You can see the full badge design here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/171054/UXLX-Badges.pdf (note the way coffee breaks and lunches are put on the side). The colour codes are to differentiate the types of talks and workshops.
Excellent post, I also really loved how the lanyard ensured easy reading of the extremely small print. :-)
by Pieter Jongerius June 15th, 2010 | 2:57 pmTweet-and-photo: http://www.twitter.com/pieterj/status/15170027012
Hi Chris,
I really enjoyed your presentation about the Human Interface, it really opened my eyes as a student/interaction designer. The next day i immediately looked for it on slideshare. I noticed the little books the moment we got them too, other conferences i went to weren’t this smart.
Anyway, thanks for the inspiration and i’ll hope to enjoy you again.
cheers,
Jeroen ( @Jrnbs )
by Jeroen Bos June 19th, 2010 | 5:35 amHi Chris,
Thanks for the response to our booklet! Just as Nick I was one of the volunteers for the conference team. Some remarks. Hope others can benefit from this extra info:
We started off with the concept of the “book on a hook” and thought of many different possibilities. We added the omega-staples and the flipped cover in the process and were very curious for the response!
We printed everything very last minute (after the registration closed) so we could personalize the booklets. (We were planning on stickering only last minute attendees, but something went wrong with the blanco booklets.)
I think the costs are hardly any higher than printing “normal booklets” + “normal badges” in plastic sleeves. Nicks estimate is about right: Around € 1,85 per personalized booklet and € 0,75 per lanyard (excl. VAT).
The design of the booklet was what took most of our time, but since we are all volunteers, we did that for free :)
We had 5 differently coloured badges: Press, sponsors, speakers, team, visitors.
The booklets were about 8xm x 10cm. Next time, we would make them a little bit bigger to accomodate bigger type. As Nick said, we had to make the longest name in our database fit.
Credits where credits are due: Me and the rest of the team were helped by my friends at Napulè (http://www.napule.nl/) for the concept and XXL Press (http://www.xxlpress.nl/) for the printing.
Thanks again for your nice words and your talk at the conference!
Erwin Elling (@erwinelling)
by Erwin Elling June 21st, 2010 | 8:50 amHow did the booklet hold up over the few days of wearing it? I’ve thought about doing a similar thing, but I’m not convinced it won’t wear badly over a couple of days and end up looking tatty and falling apart.
by Donna July 3rd, 2010 | 6:59 pm@Donna: It was a one-day conference, but I can assure you the booklet would easily endure a week-long conference without a problem. They used pretty heavy stock paper, which helped a lot. It wouldn’t look so good after being soaked in beer or barbecue sauce, I suppose. :-)
by Christopher Fahey July 8th, 2010 | 3:51 amHi Chris,
A very similar idea was used at Facebook’s f8 confrence in April 2010. It is almost the same design with arguably better typographic treatment for name cover. They also have a slightly different solution to attaching the lanyard through a circular hole in the booklet.
You can read in-depth coverage on the f8 badges in this article - http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-design/designing-f8-part-2-of-5-badges-booklets/410651332792
by Gleb Denisov August 22nd, 2010 | 1:18 am