Event Badges: How to Design Your Festival Badge
If you’re hosting a festival or concert this summer, an event badge can enhance the experience, provide it with instant credibility and, at the same time, give attendees a keepsake they’ll treasure. Unlike paper or mobile tickets, event badges instantly give a sense of status and can help with branding your event.
Depending on the event, you can create badges specifically for VIPs, or you can create them for all attendees, with different colors or designs indicating various levels of status or access. Custom event badges for a festival not only add to the experience for each attendee, but they also make it easier for security personnel to ensure, at a glance, that people are in the right areas. When creating a plastic laminate badge for your festival or event, you’ll want to put thought into making it stand out, easy to read and, most of all, attractive enough for attendees to want to keep and display it after the event is over. You’re not just making badges; you’re helping make memories. Let’s look at what goes into creating a great festival badge.
5 Tips for Designing Your Event Badge
There are several ways to design your badge, from using free or low-cost templates you can find online to working with a professional graphic designer. Working with a designer can be helpful in making sure the fonts, colors and placement all follow good design rules.
Always bring in a few extra sets of eyes to review the badge designs before you have them printed. Make sure all the verbiage is proofread for typos as well as for grammatical and punctuation errors, and look for any lettering in the design that might be hard to read.
Beyond that, follow these five tips to create a custom event badge that will make a lasting impression for your festival or concert.
Size Matters, So Think Big
Badges come in all sizes, but in a festival environment, they’re going to work best when you go big. The larger the badge, the easier it is to identify at a distance, which makes your security team’s jobs easier. But it also gives you more real estate to play with and provides more opportunity for including different design elements to make your badge truly stand out.
Prioritize Your Information
Regardless of how big you make your badge, there’s still a limited amount of space for your design, so choose your information wisely. Keep your event branding in mind and include your event logo, date and, if applicable, your slogan.
For events where attendees have different levels of access, make sure the distinction is noted in an obvious place and that it’s easy to read at a glance. Placing this information in a box across the top or bottom of the badge is a simple way to provide immediate clarification as to whether it’s a staff badge or an all-access, VIP, limited access or standard access badge.
Make It Colorful — and Memorable
This is no time to be shy. Bold colors are your friend when it comes to creating a great festival badge; use the same designs and colors found on your event posters for branding consistency. Certain color combinations are more eye-catching than others, so work with your designer to make sure that you’re getting the maximum amount of “pop” in your design.
If your event posters are simple and don’t have a logo or specific design, use this as an opportunity to create a “feel” for the event. Think of your badge as a mini-poster and give it a distinctive look that will add to its collectability. The cooler it is, the harder it is to throw away.
Consider Adding Sponsors
If sponsors are part of your event, add extra value to their sponsorship by including their logo on your badge. Several sponsors’ logos can be integrated into the overall design of the badge, or, if you have different levels of sponsorship, you can choose which levels will include placement on the badge. Then, use that as an incentive for sponsors to upgrade their support.
You can even let sponsors get extra mileage out of it by offering a discount to festival attendees who visit them after the event is over. For example, a fast food restaurant could offer a 10% discount to anyone who presents the badge for 30 days after the festival has ended.
Let It Work Overtime
As long as you have the space, there’s no reason to limit your badge design to the front; the back of a badge can be put to work as well. If you have multiple artists and/or multiple stages for your event, list the lineup and times on the back of the badge. Or, if your event covers a significant amount of space, use the back as a site map. After all, festival-goers aren’t likely to want to carry a physical map, and a printed site map on the back of their badge is a useful tool, particularly if your event doesn’t have an app that includes the layout of the festival.
Don’t Forget the Lanyard
After you’ve figured out your badge, you still have another opportunity for your event to make a great impression, and that’s through using a custom lanyard. While a standard, solid-color economy lanyard will get the job done, a custom lanyard can incorporate the colors of your logo or can provide another marketing opportunity for sponsors. They can choose to include their logo and web address on the lanyard, and a wide selection of colors means that they can also match the color of the lanyard to their corporate branding.
Let Your Badge Do the Heavy Lifting for You
When it comes to your festival, concert or other event, designing a memorable badge is a great way for attendees to pair it with a memorable experience. Making sure it is consistent with your branding creates one more way to promote your event, and it ensures a smoother entry experience for your attendees and security team. You can also make entry easier by using an online event registration tool like Event Espresso to scan your attendee badges at the door. The more you do to make it easier and more enjoyable for attendees, the better their memories about it will be.
