Standard Office Printers Badge Designer
The Standard Office Printers Badge Designer lets you lay out your own visitor badge instead of using the built-in one. 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.
Open Badges in the admin dashboard menu, then Open Standard Office Printers Badge Designer — or go straight to the designer.
This page was previously called just "Badge Designer". It now carries the longer name because
SmartLobby has a second badge designer, for Brother label printers, and the two produce very
different badges. Both are reached from the same Badges menu item. If you had the old
#/badge-designer address bookmarked, use the link above instead.
Which designer do I need?
The short version: if the badge comes out of the Brother printer standing next to your kiosk, you want the Label Printers Badge Designer. If you are printing badges yourself on an office printer — for a conference, an induction day, a batch of contractors expected on Monday — you are in the right place.
Designing a badge
Start from Choose a template to clone an existing design, or New design to begin from a blank badge. You can keep up to 5 of your own designs.
For the badge itself you can set a size preset, width and height, and a background colour or background image with a choice of image fit. Onto that you place elements — text, image, box or QR code — and position and resize them by dragging on the canvas.
Each element has properties in the panel beside the canvas:
- Text — font family, font size, bold, italic, colour, alignment (left, centre, right)
- Boxes and images — fill, border, border width, corner radius, stroke
- All elements — position, width and height
Inserting visitor details
Use Insert placeholder to drop a token into a text element. When a badge is printed, each token is replaced with that visitor's details.
| Group | Placeholders |
|---|---|
| Visitor | {fna} first name, {lna} last name, {una} visitor ID, {eml} email, {phn} phone, {cmp} company, {vty} visitor type, {car} car registration, {photoUrl} photo |
| Event | {evt} event type, {stt} start date, {end} end date, {adr} address, {lid} location, {rsn} reason |
A QR code element can also take a placeholder as its source, so the code encodes the visitor's own details.
{photoUrl} is what puts the visitor's photo on the badge. If your account does not collect visitor
photos, a design using it will print without one — so either enable photos or leave that element out.
Printing
Designs made here are for standard paper and card printers. They are not intended for Brother label printers, which have their own fixed layout — see Label Printers Badge Designer for that artwork, and Printing for connecting the label printer itself.
You can print badges for everyone matching a search from the People page: run your search, open the Badges drawer, choose a design, and generate either a single multi-up PDF or a zip of one PDF per badge.
Good to know
Choose your account's default design deliberately. Badge printing from the People page and from the
kiosk uses the account default, and not every design includes a photo — if you switch the default to
a design without {photoUrl}, printed badges stop showing photos with no other warning.
Preview as you go. The designer renders the badge with sample values so you can see how a long company name or a missing field will look before you commit a design.
Updated On August 23, 2026