Design Your Own Visitor Badge
A visitor badge does more than name a person. It shows a guard who is allowed where, tells staff whether the stranger by the lift is expected, and puts your name on the one object a visitor carries all day. Until now you got ours. SmartLobby now includes a badge designer, so you get yours.
You place text, images, boxes and a QR code on a canvas, drop in placeholders for visitor details, and save the result as a design your locations can print. Up to five of your own designs.
What a design is made of
Open it from Badges in the admin dashboard. Start from Choose a template to clone something existing, or New design for a blank badge.
Placeholders do the work
Use Insert placeholder to drop a token into a text element, and it is replaced with that visitor's details when the badge prints.
| Group | Placeholders |
|---|---|
| Visitor | first name, last name, visitor ID, email, phone, company, visitor type, car registration, photo |
| Event | event type, start date, end date, address, location, reason |
A QR element can take a placeholder too. Point it at a visitor field and the code encodes that
visitor's own details rather than one fixed string — useful if a turnstile or a second system reads it.
Preview as you go. The designer renders with sample values, so you see how a long company name wraps
or how a missing field looks before you commit a design and print fifty of them.
Full control of the layout
Set a size preset, width and height, and a background colour or image with a choice of fit. Then place
elements and drag them into position.
- Text — font family, size, bold, italic, colour, alignment
- Boxes and images — fill, border, border width, corner radius, stroke
- Everything — position, width, height
Why five designs, not one
Most sites need more than a single badge, and for reasons that have nothing to do with decoration.
Different people need different information. A contractor badge might carry a car registration and
an expiry time. A conference delegate needs the event name and a QR the door staff can scan. A visiting
auditor needs a photo and a host name. One layout cannot serve all three without carrying fields that are
blank most of the time.
Different stock. A badge that suits a plastic holder on a lanyard is not the badge you want on a
sticky label. Keeping both as saved designs means switching is choosing a design, not redoing a layout.
Seasons and events. An open day, an audit week, a site with two entrances under different rules — all
of these are easier as a saved design you switch to than as a layout you rebuild each time.
Two things to get right
These are for paper and card printers, not Brother label printers. Label printers have their own
fixed layout and their own driver path. If you print to a Brother QL, your badges continue to work
exactly as before and this designer is not the tool for them.
Choose your account default deliberately. Badge printing from the People page and from the kiosk uses
the account default design, and not every design includes a photo. Switch the default to a layout without
the photo placeholder and printed badges quietly stop showing photos, with nothing to warn you.
You can also print in bulk. Search on the People page, open the Badges drawer, pick a design, and
generate either one multi-up PDF or a zip of single-badge PDFs — useful the morning before a conference.
Ready to put your own name on your visitors' badges? Start your free 14-day trial →