Post by Doug Burbidge
Swancon 2006. You’ll see that this badge deals with some of the issues that I have been ranting about with regards to previous badges (font size, readability, single-sidedness, etc.) That’s because I made the badges for 2006.
I thought I was dead clever making transparent badges. But it turned out John Parker had beaten me to the punch some years earlier with the badges for one of his mini-cons. (Possibly while I was in the U.S.)
These are made with some software I wrote for the occasion: Badger. It does font-zooming: if you have a long name, it will make the font size small enough to fit; if you have a short name, it will make it bigger (up to some maximum size you specify). This deals nicely with the problem of sensibly displaying in the same field e.g. both “Bateman-Graham” and “Kemp”. As you can see, “Doug” is a nice short name, so Badger has zoomed it up to the maximum size.
The coloured insert is just cellophane — various colours for various membership categories, as usual. Purple for committee, shiny silver for guests, yellow for “I’m the guy who made the badges”. Ordinary full members (the largest class of member) were just transparent.
Cutting the cellophane insert square would have been tricky, so instead I cut them into irregular quadrilaterals. More interesting that way, too. It didn’t matter if the cellophane was a bit crinkly going in — the lamination process smoothed it out. There’s a second clear insert on which the name, logo and member type are printed, then whack them inside a laminating pouch and whack them into the machine.
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