Conference Badge Design
This week Steve and I attended MongoChicago, a one day conference dedicated to MongoDB. If you are not familiar with MongoDB, it is an open source, document database and it powers Harmony. One of the things that impressed me most was the layout/design of the conference badges.
Complimenting the badge design might seem odd, considering it was a database conference, but the badges were obviously well thought out. Badge design is something that has bothered me for a few years now. My main issues are the conference name is always huge and the name of the person is always tiny.
Everyone knows what conference they are at. There is no need for the name/logo to be epic in size. If nothing else, this is stereotypical “make my logo” bigger moments that need to stop. On the flip side, names are always very small. I believe, in part, that this is because some people have large names.
The problem with making the name small is that the attendees do not all know each other. There are times when you think you recognize someone, but you are not sure. If you saw their name, even their first name, you would know and bounce right over to say hi. Instead, you have doubts and linger in a corner by yourself (maybe not quite this bad).
Instead, the folks at 10Gen, organizers of the conference, made the MongoDB logo small. Even better, they made your first name huge. This made it really easy to spot peoples names from a far. Check out a quick picture I snapped with my iPhone.
Little details like this often go unnoticed, so I wanted to be sure to bring it up. Way to go 10Gen. Hopefully more conference organizers will take this cue and run with it.