Low Budget or Rush Printing Using Badge Sheets

PheedLoop offers an option that's completely different from the most commonly used option (i.e. ordering badges and lanyards directly from us), and that is called Badge Sheets. Badge Sheets are a quick, cheap, and DIY way to print badges for your event on any old printer. Generally, we see this system being used in the following cases:

Events with very basic badge requirements, standard 4" x 3" badges
Events with fewer than 200 or so attendees, though there's no actual lower or upper limit
Events in a rush to meet a deadline
Events needing to print some walk-in badges
Older and more traditional events that are used to pre-printing and stuffing their badges

Whatever your reason may be to go this route, the end result is something that still works great for countless events we power!

Step 1 - Test the Badge Sheet Export

In your dashboard, navigate to Experiences > On-Site > Badge Printing. Select any number of attendees from the table in bulk (for testing purposes, we suggest selecting 6 of them). Click on Actions in the table header, and select Export Badge Sheets. After a few seconds, you will see a PDF document pop up with a sheet of badges on it, QR codes included and all!

Step 2 - Print Your Badge Sheet

You need two things at this point, a printer and compatible badge paper stock. As you may have noticed, the badge sheets have 6 badges on them, 4 inches wide by 3 inches tall. We've found the following options from Avery to work great: 5384, 5393, 74459, 74536, 74540, 74541, 78617, 78619, 5392. These are different products offered by Avery (example of 5384) that are very similar with some minor differences in what they come bundled with and such. These products can be sourced from Avery directly, or more commonly from Amazon, Staples, OfficeMax, Grand and Toy, etc. We recommend trying this out yourself.

For printers, we recommend using color inkjet or laser printers. The better the quality of printer, the nicer your badges will look. The Avery sheets are perforated, and many of the products come with lanyards and badge holders, so you simply tear away the individual badges from the sheets and you're ready to go!

Printing Badge Singles

In some cases, you may not want to print badge sheets and instead print them one by one. This is very possible also, whether you want to print all your badges this way, or just some (for example, on-site walk-ins or badge edits). In this case, similar to Step 1 above, simply select Export Badge Singles. You will get a PDF document with individual pages for each badge, sized perfectly to fit the badge itself.

Not all regular printers will be able to print something this small as their trays may not fit 4" x 3" stock, so you may need to check your printer for compatibility or acquire a printer that works. We've found the best printer for this job is the Epson PM-400. This printer is widely available and works great. You can purchase the same badge sheets and tear away the blank single badges to create a stack of them to feed into the tray, or simply buy pre-cut 4" x 3" card stock from various online sources of stationery items or print supplies. The PM-400 is not the only printer that can work, of course. Any photo printer is a good bet as they are very well suited for the job of printing badges given how similar the size is to a photograph (plus the printers can be quite compact too!).

Customizing the Style

Like all aspects of PheedLoop, we do our best to give our users unprecedented control, down to the actual code level, to customize their own PheedLoop experiences. Badge Sheets and Badge Singles are no different. If you head over to Experiences > On-Site > Badge Settings you can edit the field called Custom Badge Style with your own custom CSS. You will see our default CSS right there, which is a helpful starting point.

We are committed to providing the option to customize PheedLoop, but do not provide custom code assistance. If you are looking to modify your badge CSS, please work with your team's web administrator or developer for assistance. A basic level of CSS knowledge should be sufficient.