ID

▤Card ☺Holders ◑Look ⛭On the card ☼Paper & age ⚖Rules 🖨Print ✓Checks ⧉Variants

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ID Card Studio

Staff badges, contractor and visitor passes, student cards, library, gym and video-club cards, hotel keys, press cards and hospital badges, 1900 to now — typed and sealed in a pouch, shot on a Polaroid ID camera, printed on PVC, worn on a lanyard. One hero card or a run of four hundred, with photographs, names, numbers and codes that scan, on a sheet with the cut line and the backs lined up for duplex. Every organisation invented. Part of Chronotype · Free to use. Licence for paid productions · the research behind it

The card — what the scene needs

Issued by

Year & country

Country

Year

How it is made — dated

Size

Upright or across

The organisation’s name — leave empty for an invented one

The holders — on the list

The photograph — zoom and position

Print the visitors’ names — otherwise the line is left to write on

A crew at once

How many

Or paste a list — from a spreadsheet, one person a line Replace the list (otherwise add to it) Photographs Add photographs…

A column row at the top is read by its names (name, surname, role, department, number, company — in any of the eleven languages); without one, the columns are taken in that order. Photographs find their holder by file name — the number, then the full name, then the surname — and the rest go in order. They stay in this file, on this computer.

Numbering

Prefix

Starts at

Digits

Inks — dated

The organisation’s mark is invented with it. To put your own logo on the card, open the Emblems page: any mark or stamp on the card can take a file of yours, and it stays on this computer.

On the card — each from its year

Made of

Photograph

Code

Magnetic stripe

A contact chip A proximity card number on the back A holographic overlay A ghost photograph A slot for a lanyard or a clip The holder’s signature

The visitor badge

A prop line on the back, in small type

Every code scans: Codabar, Code 39, Code 128 and QR carry the card’s own invented number, and a QR code a web address under .example, which nobody can own. The Checks panel says when a feature is early for the year; one the year cannot have comes off when the year moves back.

What the year asks for — and why

The sheet

Gap between cards, mm

Backs mirrored for duplex

1.5 mm bleed round each card Crop marks The cut line — the card’s outline, its corners and its slot

Print at 100% / actual size. Print / proof sends every page, fronts and backs in turn, so a duplex printer pairs them; the backs are mirrored left to right so each lands behind its front on a long-edge flip. The cut line is a rose hairline that goes on its own CutContour plate in the press PDF, for a plotter or a die; on a desktop, a corner rounder and a slot punch do the same job. For a direct-to-card printer choose “Card printer” — one card a page, at the card’s own size.

Checks — what an audience could catch

Variants — the same card, several ways

The same piece, several ways, in one pass. Everything you are not varying is held still, so the “same” design really is the same design.

What changes

Which field The alternatives — one per line

How many

caption each one on the contact sheet

Print at 100% / actual size, margins none. Every organisation and person is invented — see the Checks panel for what dates a card.