UX Australia News

A few weeks ago we asked you to help us design our conference badges. We were sick of useless, unusable conference badges and we know a lot of you were too. Our only criteria were that the badge identify the wearer to others and hang from a lanyard.

We had six entrants submit 42 images. There were two long discussions about requirements, on Matt Balara’s first version, and on his redesign.

Matt Balara won the competition

The competition winner is Matt Balara. He triggered the discussion about requirements (on Flickr and on Twitter) and iterated the design based on the feedback.

Matt will get a one-year subscription to Saasu (one of our fantastic sponsors).

We’re using Tom Voirol’s badge

We decided to use Tom Voirol’s design, which was based on Matt’s, with an upside-down schedule at the bottom.

Tom will get a subscription to an Optimal Workshop product (who are also a fantastic sponsor).

Special thanks

Thanks to the other entrants – all were exceptionally good and novel.

Jaan Orvet

Jaan Orvet’s design includes stickers for your computer or to put on yourself, and would be printed on recyclable card. The design was also beautifully annotated (below is the unannotated version):

Andreas Carlsson

Andreas Carlson’s design is cut into the shape of UX, and also would be printed on recyclable card. The design was also beautifully annotated:

Jessica Enders

Jessica Enders created a design without a lanyard – instead using a set of modular, reusable magnets:

Marc Nothrop

Marc Nothrop provided a lot of variations on a theme and included QR codes plys a personalised web page, building a bridge between the virtual and the physical:

Thinking of the environment

This year we are going to use plastic holders to contain the badge. Conferences use them because they work – they are robust & can take 3 days of wear and use. We will collect them for re-use and recycling at the end of the conference.

We’ll explore how we can avoid plastic for next year’s conference – we need to play with materials and production to make sure they are robust and wear well. The only card-based conference badges I have used were great, but stickers peeled off easily and they looked pretty ratty after 2 days handling. We want to avoid that, so will play with the idea for a while.

Thanks

Again, thanks to all of our entrants, and to everyone who contributed to the discussion about what makes a great conference badge. We hope this is useful for other conferences.