
Rules for a Better Conference Name Badge (2017) - fanf2
https://badge.reviews/10-rules-for-a-better-conference-name-badge/
======
justinph
The best badges I've ever had the pleasure of wearing were at Srccon (a
conference for news nerds). They were highly legible and simple. Here's an
example:
[https://media.opennews.org/img/uploads/article_images/emily_...](https://media.opennews.org/img/uploads/article_images/emily_erik_westra.jpg)

At first I was a little dismayed that they omitted the company name, but I
came to really like that. It made it a lot easier to have conversations with
people if you remove the barrier of status that a company might infer,
probably wrongly. It was a great equalizer to know the folks at the smallest
college dailies had the same problems as the largest news outfits in the
country.

~~~
twic
The best badges i've had are at various low-rent unconferences, where you get
a sticky label and a sharpie on arrival, and you can write your own.

Want to chat but be a bit anonymous? Just write your first name but big! Want
people to be able to find you after? Full name and twitter handle! Primarily
known by a pseudonym online? Write that! Proud of where you work? Add your
company name! Tired of being mistaken for a designer? Use your job title!
Prefer certain pronouns? State xem! Impressive title? Prefix in your neatest
calligraphy! Burning passion for a particular subject? Jot it underneath your
name! Hiring, raising, jobhunting, looking for someone to play baduk with? Put
pen to label! Mad art skills? Throw down!

No lanyard length quandaries, cheap and easy to supply, usually end up around
eye level, don't poke awkwardly when sitting, and they don't flip round!

------
ghaff
As someone who probably gets a good dozen full-blown conference name badges a
year, I mostly agree with his comments with the exception of a few things.

1\. Badges with two attachment points do reduce flipping but they don't
eliminate it. I'm sympathetic to using the back of a badge for useful info
like a map of the venue or even a plastic sleeve for a schedule. So it's a
tradeoff. But if you're not going to use the back for something useful, print
on both sides.

2\. Preferably use a lanyard if it's a "real" conference. It's often hard to
pin stuff.

3\. I get his comment on the QR codes but larger conferences need some way to
scan people at booths and possibly breakouts (for attendee reports). NFC/RFID
can work too and is sometimes used. Not clear to me one way is a big win over
the other.

~~~
sokoloff
QR code on the back as he suggests seems a perfectly fine place for it. In
fact, that makes it slightly less likely that I'm going to get irrelevant spam
after the conference from someone scanning my badge when I didn't intend to
permit it.

------
donaltroddyn
I disagree vehemently with rules 1,2,4, and 7. I value my privacy and don't
want to provide my name and details to everyone I pass and every vendor I talk
to.

At every conference I've attended, I remove or flip my badge immediately after
entering. I've never felt that this impacted my ability to meet new people and
connect with them, so I don't accept the author's assertion that it's
necessary (or even helpful) to make new connections. The remainder of the
rules are predicated on rule 1, which I think leaves them irrelevant.

I'd go so far as to say that if a conference tries to enforce rules 1 and 7
(everyone has to wear a badge and no flipping), then I will simply decline to
attend. The only badge that I'd be happy to wear continuously is a badge with
no legible PII that's used purely for access control, and even then, most of
the time, conferences don't require that kind of access control.

~~~
pjc50
This sounds like a good case for something like the "traffic light" system for
indicating who's happy to have photos taken of them. Doing it with lanyards
makes it nice and simple to rectify afterwards: if you see a red lanyard in
the photo then you've made a mistake.

(Obvious point: badges that are highly readable by humans squinting to see
your name are also highly readable in photographs. And please consider if
there's a solution for badges for female attendees that doesn't encourage
people to look at their chests to read their names.)

~~~
chrisseaton
I've seen badges for how willing people are to have conversations - a traffic
light system for 'please talk to me about anything' to 'I'd rather mind my own
business'.

------
buro9
Something I liked immensely from a conference that dealt with under-
represented people in tech is that a lanyard colour denotes whether or not you
can be photographed.

i.e. a blue lanyard means that you can be photographed, and a red/pink one
that you cannot be photographed (these colours survive most colour blindness
too)

~~~
androidgirl
Can also add the Trello "pattern" approach. A white dots pattern means you can
be photographed, stripes means no.

------
jpatokal
All these examples of bad badges, but not a single good one? A picture would
have been worth the entire blog post here.

Update: Huh, apparently that angry fruit salad at the end was supposed to be a
good one. Fortunately the one on the homepage looks decent:
[https://badge.reviews/](https://badge.reviews/)

Github:
[https://github.com/BadgeReviews/badges](https://github.com/BadgeReviews/badges)

~~~
hxsvui
You didn't read the article, there's one at the bottom.

~~~
chrisseaton
> You didn't read the article

It's against HN guidelines to accuse someone of not reading the article.

~~~
vibragiel
You're getting downvoted, but the guidelines explicitly say:

> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even
> read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article
> mentions that."

------
extra88
There are "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" that are relevant to
badges. For instance #6, people’s names fit within a certain defined amount of
space; names being in 64 point type is good unless will make a name wrap to
another line.

Most conferences are not multilingual and it's reasonable to write names in an
alphabet understood by most attendees. Something helpful is if given name and
family name are to be styled differently, that that actually be done, don't
just make the name that comes first different.

~~~
ghaff
What mostly tends to happen in practice is that people come up with
simplified/shortened versions of their name for name badges (whether full
conference badges or just informal sticky-type badges).

~~~
signal11
This isn't just conference-specific. I know people from cultures where long
names are quite common. Just like Theodore contracts to Ted, there's a
reasonably simple culture-specific way of shortening them, and most of them do
shorten them, e.g. Venkataramarajan to Venkat or Consolación to Conny. Note
that often the contraction isn't obviously related to the original name (e.g.
William => Bill).

This is why any system that takes names should have a way to specify a
"Display Name", which may or may not follow the firstname lastname pattern.
Particularly when those names need to be printed out for conferences.

------
peterwwillis
The other aspect to badges are their usefulness to convention staff. Depending
on the conference, you may have 30 different types of badges, and real humans
all around the conference need to interpret these things for sometimes tens of
thousands of people.

Badges need to be unique, easily differentiated from each other, not easily
lost or destroyed, and (ideally) carry uniquely identifying information. They
should be hard to duplicate, easy to verify, and include useful information on
the back (such as contact information, conference dates/hours, and rules and
regulations). They may convey emergency response information, age, a photo ID,
and convention access designations. And they have to work within the
constraints of convention registration, which includes buying/generating a
brand new, personally-identifiable badge on-site.

All these considerations typically trump your networking goals. If your
convention has a "good networking badge", it may suck for use by the
convention staff. (also, a lot of conventions don't learn from others and
slowly, painfully evolve their badging. and the people designing these badges
often never had to actually _use_ the damn things)

------
tom_mellior
> unless you print the same thing on both sides (and you shouldn’t)

Yes you should.

> Of course you can just print the same thing on both sides, but why not use
> the backside for something useful like a map of the space or basic agenda
> information?

Print the same thing (name, affiliation, etc.) on two pieces of paper facing
either side, stick them in the plastic sleeve, put additional info between
them. It's not that hard.

~~~
ghaff
That is probably the ideal. It probably costs more than most other approaches
to badges though.

~~~
tom_mellior
Most of the (scientific) conferences I've been to already have the paper-in-
plastic-sleeve badge kind, and universities are very stingy, so I suspect it's
the cheapest possible version. Very often you already have extra info in
there, like a slip of paper with your individual Wifi access information. The
only extra cost to having this two-sided is printing the name slip twice
instead of once, and I that should be negligible. A little extra paper is
certainly cheaper than lanyards with two attachment bits for the two
attachment point version (that can still flip).

~~~
ghaff
One of the issues with a lot of those plastic sleeves with one lanyard
attachment point is that it's relatively easy to tear the plastic with a thin
metal clasp.

For pricey conferences that are very strict about replacing lost badges, I do
want something that's solid. (which should probably be another badge best
practice if you won't readily replace for free.)

------
ken
I’m surprised there’s no mention of the convention of using all caps for
surnames. Being able to read the letters and your company name and preferred
pronoun and favorite subjects and twitter handle is not worth much if I can’t
even tell which is your given name.

Hello ... Mr. Brian?

~~~
ghaff
You presumably have your own badge so you know what the convention is for a
given show.

~~~
ken
So I'm supposed to check my name on my own badge, when meeting someone else,
to be able to parse their name correctly? And I should assume that the
organizers printed _surnames_ (rather than _last_ names) in the same relative
position, despite this being wrong for a lot of people?

We already have a well established _international_ convention on how to write
names. Why would anyone create their own?

------
mmwako
I went to Collision Conf last year and there was one hyper useful feature on
the name badges (which had a great design): "role". All badges had on top
"Startup", "Guest", "Investor", and other categories I can't recall. This was
really useful, if you are an investor you can talk to startups and the other
way round. Startups also had a "beta" and "alpha" subcategory, that
represented startup scale. Obviously, many don't like being so easily spotted,
but it helped strike a lot of conversations.

------
probably_wrong
As someone who cannot remember names, I've given this topic way too much
thought.

> You should be able to read a badge with a quick and non-obvious/non-
> lingering glance

I'm looking forward to the day in which wearing name badges in your forehead
is the accepted rule. There really is no way to look at someone's stomach
"discretly".

Adjustable badges would help a bit, until you realise that the people whose
name you should already know are often the people who don't bother adjusting
their badges to begin with.

------
carlob
QR codes that give recruiters and marketers my email information are bad and
should die. I'm looking at you codemotion!

~~~
pluma
This is a legislation problem, not a conference problem. I've had my badge
scanned for a contest at a European conference early last year and the person
at the booth pointed out that it's pointless because they'll have to delete
all that data when the GDPR is implemented anyway.

I never heard from them again. Nor should I. The GDPR pretty much got rid of
data collection without explicitly informed consent and makes it trivial to
withdraw at any point.

------
SuperGent
I'm surprised that this sort of thing hasn't been addressed before. At most
big conferences, the exhibitors want to know who you are, where you work and
what you do and bigger/more clear the badge is will only help them. Of course,
this can make some people feel uncomfortable, but this rarely stops
organisers.

------
jonnydubowsky
I love the interactive nature of the Defcon unofficial hardware badges.
[https://hackaday.com/2018/08/14/all-the-badges-of-def-
con-26...](https://hackaday.com/2018/08/14/all-the-badges-of-def-
con-26-vol-1/)

------
twic
> If you can learn something via other means, meeting new people becomes the
> most important part of a conference. But meeting new people at a conference
> isn’t a given for all of us.

This should have been front and centre. The author's goal at conferences is to
meet people - to be able to prowl through a crowd, pick out people who seem
interesting, approach them, and be easily able to start a conversation with
them.

He has designed a badge to support that - where everyone is required to
display a large name and some credentials at all times. He has not designed a
badge to support any other use cases. Whether this badge design works for you
or your conference will depend on what your use cases are.

------
virusduck
Hoo boy--huge badges are the worst (4 x _8_??). Fine when you're standing up,
I guess, but they turn into such a poky distraction when you sit down for a
talk. I'd rather apply the rest of these rules to the 4x3 or 4x4 badges.

------
mikece
"Ditch the QR code" \-- cannot agree enough. The two sources of unsolicited
email that Gmail doesn't eliminate (at least for me) are political actors and
people who scanned my badge at a conference. So far conferences haven't
refused me entry for putting a QR code sticker over their QR code which
contains an alternative email address but I wish I had the opportunity to give
the conference organizers one email address and a second one for embedding on
the badge.

Or, as the article suggests, just let me supply an email address when vendors
and sponsors ask.

~~~
extra88
Do you have to supply your real email address to the conference in the first
place?

~~~
mikece
It's not always me signing up for a conference but whoever in HR drew the
short straw. Explaining to them why they need to sign me up as
someRandomConference@myPersonalDomain.com is like explaining astrophysics to
my 3 year old niece.

------
playpause
> Rule 6: DON’T USE ALL CAPS > Because it’s harder to read ALL CAPS at a
> distance.

Source? I've never heard this before and it's the opposite of what I would
guess.

~~~
ghaff
Yeah. Someone ought to tell the US Department of Transportation. (CAPS
probably do take more space but the statement that they're harder to read in
the distance is definitely not true in the general case.)

~~~
jbgreer
Came here wanting to cite a study advocating use of lowercase letters (as I've
been told), but a quick search turned up this:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2016788/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2016788/)

"Our finding that size thresholds for upper-case text were lower than those
for lower-case text in Experiment 1 are not surprising, and corroborate the
findings of (M. Tinker, 1963) that at great viewing distance (as simulated by
small visual size), upper-case text is more legible, even in a font with a
relatively large x-height, which might be expected to minimize upper- and
lower-case differences. Other fonts, which typically have smaller x-heights,
might be expected to show upper-case text to have even greater relative
legibility. Contrary to Tinker’s findings, and the conventional wisdom, is the
result that upper-case text is more legible in terms of reading speed, for
readers with reduced acuity due to visual impairment, and in normally-sighted
readers when text is visually small. This result may have practical
significance as well; it suggests that, apart from economic considerations of
how much space a given sample of text occupies, letter size determines
legibility for low vision readers and for those viewing visually small text;
and when point size is fixed, upper-case text is simply more legible, albeit
less aesthetically appealing, than lower-case."

------
GrinningFool
> If the badge wearer is a woman, you’re not asking other attendees to stare
> at her chest which is incredibly uncomfortable for the badge-wearer. Not to
> mention it's uncomfortable to me as the one staring. Nothing says "I don't
> know your name (even if I should)" like that half-second glance down to a
> badge. Or longer, if the badge suffers from usability problems.

------
scarpino
Totally agree with a lot of this, especially the part about making it harder
for badges to flip. I went to re:Invent this year and if the security drones
are going to yell at you to turn your badge over as you're walking through
their nonsense gates to nowhere, and they ARE going to yell at you, then the
badges shouldn't flip over in the first place.

------
chrisseaton
Why do these badges emphasise the first name so much over the surname? If I'm
talking to someone at a conference seeing 'Mary' or something won't help me
much. I need to see the surname 'Wollstonecraft' or something in order to be
reminded about what they've worked on that I know about and what I wanted to
talk to them about.

~~~
tom_mellior
I've observed this discrepancy between scientific conferences and more
industry/community oriented ones. In scientific circles it makes sense not to
de-emphasize last names. As you say, last names are how you identify authors
whose work you've seen. Emphasizing first names may make more sense in
communities where you aren't expected to know exactly who works on what.
Compare "ah, you're M. Wollstonecraft, I've read your book" vs. "nice to meet
you, Mary, one of the many faceless persons who work on a project named
Frankenstein at Huge Company, Inc.".

------
ryanmarsh
After reading TFA my question now is who sells badges that don’t flip around?

~~~
ghaff
They all flip around to some degree. There are badges that have two attachment
points that are less likely to flip around. (Or, as others have said, you can
print on two sides so it doesn't matter if they flip around.) But I don't know
a specific vendor. I imagine their are online suppliers for this sort of
thing.

------
springogeek
I'd also suggest adding preferred pronouns.

~~~
maaaats
That's explicitly covered in _Rule 5_.

~~~
pluma
Do you mean "implicitly"? I can't find any mention of pronouns and Rule 5 only
seems to propose allowing attendees to add personal interests to the badge.

The idea behind adding pronouns is both to help avoid awkward situations both
for people unintentionally appearing rude out of ignorance and people having
to point out how they'd like to be referred to.

~~~
aepiepaey
No, explicitly. Last sentence in first paragraph for rule 5:

> Also it’s nice to allow your attendees the option to add pronouns to their
> badge.

~~~
pluma
Sorry. I skimmed that entire section three times and never noticed that
sentence.

------
spaceflunky
Those Google IO badges are the worst.

Like ok we get it... You're at io... Apparently that's all that matters. No
one needs meet other people. They just need to compliment each other on going
to io.

