Events are a fundamental element in communication between markets and businesses. These gatherings become an effective tool for attracting all stakeholders by offering quality content. Often, organizers focus on the program, the guests, and event promotion, overlooking the importance of well-designed badges essential to facilitating connections among participants.
In this article, we’ll delve into the art of badge design, analyzing the key elements for an optimal design and leveraging our expertise as a UX agency. We’ll discover how colors, symbols, fonts, materials, and technologies like QR codes can create passes that enhance attendee experiences, maximize ROI, and leave a positive impression of the event.
The ability to foster interaction among attendees is a measure of an event’s value and success, not only for guests and organizers but especially for sponsors, whose main goal is a solid return on investment (ROI). Organizers must remember that sponsoring companies are primary clients who expect to gain opportunities to connect with new businesses and potential customers.
A well-designed badge is essential for enabling immediate and relevant connections, and maximizing ROI for sponsors. For example, an accessible, customized pass might use identifiable colors and other distinctive elements, such as icons or text, to indicate participants’ roles. This solution helps everyone, including those with visual impairments, recognize roles more easily and make the most of networking opportunities.
If the events industry aims to evolve and improve the experience for all participants (guests and stakeholders), it must embrace Service Design. This approach to service design focuses on user experience and improving the interaction between customers and providers, highlighting the importance of relationships and commercial connections.
Service Design for an event includes fundamental elements like intuitive badge design, visual segmentation of participants, accessible information, and easy role identification. These aspects enhance interaction effectiveness and the commercial success of events.
Too often, attendees’ experiences are diminished by inadequate badges, designed without considering their true role. A badge isn’t just a tool for access or attendance tracking: it’s a key element for facilitating connections among participants and, especially, for meeting sponsors’ needs to achieve ROI. Specifically, a well-designed badge with clear colors and readable information allows participants to quickly recognize others’ roles, sparking targeted and fruitful conversations. This kind of interaction fosters meaningful connections, making the event more productive for all involved.
Accessibility is also crucial when designing badges. It’s essential to ensure that all passes are usable by everyone, avoiding colors and fonts that are unreadable for individuals with disabilities. A properly designed, inclusive badge eliminates any form of social discrimination.
Organizers often fail to consider badges from the perspective of participants, particularly exhibitors. The events industry is still too focused on attendance numbers, ignoring that sponsors’ ROI quality truly makes the difference. Exhibitors aren’t interested in flashy gadgets; they aim to make contacts and generate business opportunities.
The badge is one of the few tools that can facilitate connections during an event. Its role is to enable exhibitors to quickly identify the type of participant they are engaging with, allowing for targeted interactions. This is essential for avoiding wasted time and resources.
The badge must always be designed with specific rules in mind to make it an effective tool for supporting commercial dynamics and facilitating connections.
An effective pass must be large enough to be legible from 3-5 meters away. This means a minimum size of 15×10 cm, ensuring the company name and participant’s name can be read effortlessly. This allows exhibitors to identify people without getting too close, which might feel intrusive. A badge that is too small makes identification difficult, compromising connections’ effectiveness.
According to various scientific studies, the minimum readable font size from 3 meters away is about 1.5–2 cm. Research by the United States Sign Council Foundation and published in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding suggests that this size ensures comfortable reading even with high text-background contrast (Journal of Vision, ShareOK Journals). Below these dimensions, readability may suffer, even with a strong contrast.
To ensure optimal readability for key texts, font sizes closer to 3 cm are recommended. A neutral background, preferably white or light-colored, improves text legibility. If badges are differentiated by participant type using colors, it’s essential to maintain high contrast between text and background and include other distinctive elements like icons or labels to ensure accessibility for all (Bullough J.D., 2017). Avoid overly elaborate or bright backgrounds that might distract from the main content or affect readability. Considering these elements, to ensure readability from a distance of 3 meters, it might be necessary to increase the font size (Journal of Vision, August 2011).
Font size and weight must ensure readability even from a distance. They’re also vital for creating an information hierarchy, prioritizing the participant’s company identification first and their role second. Regarding font style, Serif fonts are generally preferable, and bold text should be avoided for very small sizes (ScienceDaily, 2016). Additionally, professional printing is crucial, as on-site badge printing often leads to poor results, long waits, and a negative attendee experience.
The badge must clearly display the exhibitor/sponsor’s brand, prioritizing this over the event’s branding.
Sponsor corporate identity should be the focus, with their logo positioned prominently and strategically. Information should be kept minimal to maintain a clean and user-friendly badge design. To prevent the issue of unreadable names when badges are flipped, front and back designs should be mirrored, ensuring maximum usability and immediate readability of information.
When many logos need to be included, they can be slightly reduced in size to maintain balance or omitted if their number compromises the readability of the main information. While ensuring brand visibility is important, alternative methods to highlight sponsors during the event can avoid cluttering the badge. This approach balances aesthetics and functionality, delivering a clean design with immediate usability without sacrificing crucial details.
Large companies often participate under a holding name, making it difficult for exhibitors to identify represented brands. In such cases, the badge should also list key group brands. For example, Stellantis could include Alfa Romeo and Iveco. This information is vital for sponsors, as their commercial value proposition may align with a specific brand within the holding but not with others.
Each badge should feature a color code to indicate the participant’s type. For example, blue for companies, green for exhibitors, and red for journalists. This improves understanding and facilitates rapid identification. The clear visual distinction allows exhibitors to quickly spot potential clients, optimizing time. Colors should be easily distinguishable; avoid similar shades that might confuse attendees. Saturated, high-contrast colors are recommended for better visibility.
QR codes are often included on badges to collect visitor information. To be effective, they should contain phone numbers and email addresses. Sponsors need direct contact with potential clients, and experience shows response rates are higher when phone numbers are available. Additionally, QR codes linking to participants’ LinkedIn profiles and storing personal information (e.g., in V-card format) would further facilitate connections.
Creating QR codes with this data is simple and fast using online tools. Ensure high-quality images to avoid scanning issues, and position the code prominently for optimal user experience.
In recent years, many digital solutions have attempted to improve event interactions, such as apps for scheduling meetings. However, the most important aspect of an event remains serendipity—the possibility of unplanned, fruitful encounters. Apps, often featuring outdated user experiences, cannot replace the value of physical events, where visual interaction and spontaneous communication are enhanced by well-designed badges.
Event organizers should seize this opportunity to increase the value of conferences and trade shows for all stakeholders. If the events industry wants to evolve, it must embrace a Service Design approach that prioritizes all participants’ experiences and emphasizes the importance of relationships and commercial connections.
At Conflux, we’ve reflected deeply on these challenges and decided to contribute as designers to improving this essential aspect of events. We’ve created a free design kit to help anyone organizing events design effective and functional badges following these guidelines.
We believe that well-designed events benefit all industries in Italy, and we hope event organizers will make use of our kit.
What do you think about event badges? Email us at sales@weareconflux.com to share the least effective badges you’ve encountered. We’re collecting examples to understand better what shouldn’t be done in their design and what should be emphasized. Your suggestions will be included in our manifesto on event badges, which will be published on the Conflux website, where you can also download our free design kit.
