Post by Doug Burbidge
I was in Las Vegas for four years, so I’m missing Swancon badges from 1997 to 2000. (This is also the reason I don’t have my 20th badge yet.) If anybody has badges from these years, feel free to send us a scan or a pic, via email, flickr, or any of the other myriad means encompassed by the internet.
Anyway, somewhere in those intervening years, we switched from re-usable plastic badge holders to laminated tags. This is much cheaper per tag, but there’s the capital cost of the laminator to consider. Still, on our scale, we come out substantially ahead on the deal.
This year’s convention chose the bicapitalized SwanCon name. We do seem to vary this from year to year — I think the single-cap Swancon is slightly more common, but we don’t have any official policy, so it’s anything goes. (I think sWANCon is fairly unambiguously wrong, though.)
Somewhere between 1996 and 2001 we also appear to have switched from landscape to portrait. Of course, the two changes are related.
The other change with the lamination is that if you punch a single hole in the top and thread string through it (as with this badge), there’s a 50% chance of the badge flipping around. If it’s single-sided (which this one is), then half the members of the convention have names and half of them are Mr or Ms Blank. On the other hand, it does give me the opportunity to add my own artwork on the back.