An ID card is dated by how it was made

① The one-line version

A typed paper card with a glued photograph and a stamp across its corner, heat-sealed in a pouch, until about 1990; the Polaroid ID camera, photographing the portrait and the data together, from the late 1960s; dye-sublimation printing on PVC from about 1990; the vertical badge on a lanyard from about 2000; flat design, the first name large and a QR code from the 2010s. ISO 7810 (1985) fixes the size: 85.60 × 53.98 mm with rounded corners. The studio sets every label, title and line of small print in the language of eleven countries — the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece (Ελλάδα, in the formal spelling before 1982), Portugal, the Netherlands, Turkey and Russia — with each country’s own way of writing a date and the Soviet пропуск for a works pass.

② How a card was made, decade by decade

Years	What a card could be
1900–1940	A printed card or a folded booklet, filled in by hand: the library ticket, the club card, the press card issued for curfew passes in the First World War.
1940–1960	Photo badges clipped or pinned on in war plants, shipyards and film studios: a black-and-white photograph and a number larger than the name.
1950–1990	Printed in one ink, filled in on a typewriter, the photograph glued on and a rubber stamp or an embossed seal across its corner, heat-sealed in a clear pouch with a margin all round.
1968–1998	The Polaroid ID camera photographs the portrait and a typed data card side by side on one print, which is trimmed and laminated. Colour instant film arrived in 1963; the cards have its softness and warm cast.
1990–2026	Direct-to-card dye-sublimation printers put the photograph and the design on white PVC; the holographic overlay, the proximity card and the slot for a lanyard come with them. The badge turns upright on the lanyard from about 2000; flat colour and the big first name from the 2010s.

③ What the year could put on it

From	Feature
1963	A colour photograph (Polaroid colour instant film). Before it, black and white.
1972	Codabar, designed to be printable on impact printers — the library’s code: fourteen digits, a 2 for a borrower, the library’s own number, the borrower’s and a check digit.
1974 / 1981	Code 39, then the denser Code 128, on staff badges and student cards.
late 1980s	The magnetic stripe on campus and staff cards: black for high coercivity, brown for low. Still on almost every campus card in the 2020s.
1990s	Proximity cards for the doors, holographic overlay laminates, contact chips.
2000s	A ghost image — a second, faint copy of the photograph — on higher-security cards.
2010s	A QR code, usually a link for checking the card.

④ The kinds

• Staff badge and contractor pass: the firm’s mark, the photograph, the name, the number and what it opens; a contractor’s in another colour with an expiry date.
• Visitor pass: numbered, not named. The self-expiring badge — conceived in 1976, on the market in the 1980s — shows red stripes after hours and EXPIRED by the next morning.
• Student and school cards: photograph, student number, faculty and academic year, the library code on them from the 1970s.
• Library, gym and video-club cards: a membership number, a barcode for the desk, the house rules on the back — and, on the video club’s, the reminder to rewind.
• Hotel keys: a metal key on a heavy plastic fob that promises the postage if it is carried away; the punched-hole key card from 1979; the magnetic stripe through the 1980s and 1990s; contactless from the 2000s; the phone from 2014.
• Press cards: PRESS in large letters, the outlet or the association, the photograph and signature, the year it is valid for — often with an annual sticker — and a request to the authorities on the back. The UK’s national scheme dates from 1992; the studio draws invented outlets’ and associations’ cards, never a national scheme’s.
• Hospital badges: the role set large, in a colour, so a patient can read it from the bed; each hospital sets its own colours, and a separate role card often hangs below the photo badge.

⑤ Four hundred at once

A crew, a hospital ward or a newsroom needs the same card for every person. The studio takes a list pasted from a spreadsheet (the columns are read by their names in any of the eleven languages), matches photographs to people by file name, numbers the run, and imposes the cards on A4, Letter, A3 or SRA3 — ten ID-1 cards to an A4 page — with bleed, crop marks, and the cut line on its own CutContour plate. The backs are mirrored left to right so a long-edge duplex print lands each back behind its front; for a direct-to-card printer it writes one card a page.

⑥ What is invented, and what is real

Every organisation, person, address and number is invented; telephones are from the ranges set aside for drama, and web addresses end in .example, which nobody can own. The codes are real symbology: a scanner in shot reads them and gets the card’s invented number. A small line on the back says the card is a film prop and not a valid identity document — leave it on for any badge that could be worn off set.

⑦ What we could not verify

• When the lanyard became the usual way to wear a workplace badge; the studio uses the late 1980s for the slot and 2000 for the upright badge.
• The first direct-to-card ID printers; the studio uses 1990.
• When QR codes became common on staff and student cards, rather than possible; the studio uses 2008.