All articles · 2026-09-18

Delegate badges: artwork that stays sharp at 90 mm and at a glance

Badges are printed small, read fast and produced in hundreds. How to prepare the artwork so names stay legible and the mark stays crisp.

A conference badge is read from about a metre away, by somebody who is already mid-handshake. Everything about the artwork has to serve that. A mark recognisable at a glance, a name large enough to read without leaning in, and a print that holds up whether you produce forty or four hundred.

A badge outline with a tab, a teal disc and a red ribbon: on the left the small JPEG copy with soft edges; on the right clean outlines and flat colour. — Left: 180 pixels, JPEG quality 62. Right: Logo mode, four colours. 6 paths, 147 nodes.

The badge template is not the badge

Almost every badge job is a fixed design plus a variable name. Keep those two things apart from the beginning: the template — border, event mark, colour blocks, ribbon shape — as vector artwork, and the names as real text laid over it at print time. Merging a name into the artwork means re-exporting hundreds of files and re-checking every one of them.

Where vector actually matters here

At badge size, a raster event mark can look acceptable on screen and still print soft, because a badge is printed at 300 dpi or better and most web copies are nowhere near that. The rule of thumb is simple: at 300 dpi, a 40 mm wide mark needs about 470 pixels. If your logo file is smaller than that, it is being stretched, and the stretch shows most on the diagonal and curved parts.

The top tab of the badge magnified: on the left the rounded tab breaks into grey blocks; on the right it is a clean shape with even edges. — The slot tab. Small features like this are where a stretched raster gives itself away on a printed badge.

Things worth deciding before you print four hundred

Name text at 18 pt or larger — badges are read across a gap, not across a desk
Put the name high on the badge: the lower half disappears behind a lanyard clip and folded arms
Leave the slot or hole punch area completely clear of artwork, with at least 10 mm of margin
Bleed of 3 mm on any colour reaching the edge, the same as any other trimmed print job
Print one badge, wear it for ten minutes, then print the rest

A note on the ribbon

Coloured ribbons — speaker, sponsor, staff — are read faster than any word on the badge. If you use them, make the colour difference obvious rather than tasteful; two similar shades under an event’s lighting are the same colour.

Vectorizing an old badge design gives you a clean, editable template to work from, exactly reproducing the shapes you had. It does not judge whether the layout was any good. If last year’s badges were hard to read, trace them, then fix the type size — the trace is the starting point, not the verdict.