Hi, I'm delighted to see so many good comments on what appears to be a tiny issue. I'm responding to various people in the same message below...
Upfront: badges, like most other things, are a compromise between sever- al forces at work, minimality, expressivness, usefulness, etc. There won't be a "solution" satisfying every concern to 100 %. The art lies in finding the right balance in dealing with these forces. Marius Gedminas: > I've got some ReportLab expertise (but I'm sure Dinu has more). I can > help with the badge maker. Thanks! I cannot comment on this, since I don't know how much experience you have. ;-) > My personal interest is to make sure the badge maker can handle non- > ASCII > characters correctly. Right so, since in your language you use some "interesting" characters, like in one of the badges in my sample PDF. John Pinner: > 2. We provide a stand with a sample of books for people to see. They > can then order books with an EP promotional code and get their > discount. EP gets a percentage and the sample books for draw prizes or > auction. Sounds like a great option to me, although not having Josette there is really a pitty. Richard Wall: > On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 2:49 PM, John Pinner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > <snip> >> One of the things that the Registration system will do is produce the >> delegate badges: double sided, with extra information inside to help >> with registration etc: eg if the delegate has to pay money on the >> door, whethere they're booked on a tutorial, their tee shirt size, >> dinner table etc etc. >> Work has been started on this by Richard Wall: I'm sure he'd welcome >> lots of help from Dinu, especially as he's using Reportlab to produce >> the badges and Dinu must have lots of knowledge there ;) > > Yep, I did start doing some work on it. I'd be delighted to work with > some else on it; especially someone with ReportLab expertise. > > I'm sorry to say that I haven't touched it since last PyWM meeting, > but current code is here: > * https://code.launchpad.net/~richardw/+junk/badgemaker > > I missed the beginning of this thread, but Dinu's badge does look > very cool. > * http://me.in-berlin.de/~darwin/tmp/badges.pdf > If there is a script that already generates that, then we should > definitely reuse it. > > Dinu, email me if you want to collaborate. I'll be glad to do that, if that's what needs to be done. It's more complicated for me than running something on my own box, though, since the badges you've seen are only a "use case" of a library I'm writing, which is not yet available. This is especially true for the PDF inclusion (for a would-be PDF logo). So, if I'm to provide code, I'll first need to tailor it down to this specific task. Richard, I'll contact you via private email. Douglas Napoleone: > Some notes on badges from PyCon US 2008 [...] Thanks for providing such a great level of detail! > Note on photo on the badge: I love the idea, but good luck getting > people to give you photo's. If you do not make it a requirement, then > some people will go for it, but most will not. This will also cause > issues with printing. There are resolution/DPI along with CMYK/Pantone > issues to deal with. All web images are RGB, and all professional > printing is CMYK. From experience, unless you have a graphic designer > going back and cleaning up all your images for the badges they will > look like garbage, and in many cases headshots will not be > distinguishable as a human. You will need to deal with scale and DPI. > JPG, PNG, and GIF all allow for encoding the DPI in the actual image > but rarely use this, defaulting to 1dot per pixel. If you ever print a > web page with images turned on you will see what I am talking about. > Unless the designer specifically took print into consideration, the > images will be so small that you can't see them, going with 1pixel per > dot, and letting the printer deal with it. Thus a 360x360 image is 1/2 > inch square on a default photo printer setting, and often smaller on > professional setups. Scaling and aliasing then become problems as > well. No one has proper vector graphic head shots. True! Especially people from Germany are very reluctant to provide personal data like fingerprints, iris scans and photographs. And still, many leave exactly this kind of info to the US Immigration authorities when travelling to PyCon. So it's more of a theoretic show stopper. (I wonder if the same people will stop coming to PyCon as soon as the US will start making sperm specimen a requirement for males entering into the US? ;-) Regarding color space and resolution issues: this is true for offset printing, but no issue at all when using laser or ink printers. To be honest, because of the low volume I haven't thought even a minute about offset printing in this case. > Of course if you decide that professional printing is not worth it and > you are just going to print on stock avery cards in an inkjet printer > in RGB mode, then things get much simpler. You just need to hand fix > each badge for the long names and the headshot (which is what was done > for all previous US PyCon's; replace headshot with BG image and > icons). This does make double sided printing more difficult. Regarding the long names issue: this is a non-issue if you scale the text down properly, which can be done entirely automatically, on one line or two lines, say. > Jacob Hallén: > Conference badges is a subject on which I have some fairly strong > opinions. I > designed the badges for EP 2003 and EP 2004. I'd be interested in seeing them. Do you have any of them left? > - The first and foremost function of the badge is to show the > wearers name so > that others can read it. This means that the name should be as large > as it > reasonably can, in a font that is as readable as possible. Using all > capitals > reduces readability. If you want to distinguish between christian > name and > surname, write them on different lines. Make the text black on > white, for the > best contrast. You can colour the rest of the badge all you like, > but keep a > white background for the name. Capitals: This depends highly on the length of the text. I believe my own perception mirrors what seems to be broadly acknowledged: Capitals reduce readability for long texts, but improve it for short texts. Let me illustrate with two examples. 1. I spent some years working in France, and on basically all forms I saw on paper or name badges at conferences the family names were always in capitals. I'm completely neutral with that habit, but it did attract my attention. I do believe French people do it exactly for the reason of making the names *more* and not less readable, and to indicate the family name, of course. Maybe somebody from France can comment on this? 2. Tony Buzan, the inventor of mind maps argues for capital letters as *improving* readability in mind maps. See a nice introduction by Tony given here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlabrWv25qQ http://www.imindmap.com/videos Colour contrasts: Black on white is great for *long* texts (books, etc.), but much less so for short texts trying to capture some amount of your attention in a noisy world. I remember some psychology studies being made on the subject which found out empirically, that black on yellow, white on blue and white on green are about the "most success- ful" combinations for capturing a human's attention. In any case that corresponds greatly to the airport and road signs I've seen up to now anywhere I've been. I must admit, I don't know about Sweden, since I've never been there so far. ;-) > - Other things that need to be on the badge are an indication that > the badge > is for EP2008 (showing that the wearer is accredited at the > conference) and > other useful information about the person. I put the country code of > the > participants home country, the persons organisation and the email > address on > the badge. IRC nick and interests at the conference are other useful > ideas. > Showing if the person is staff, speaker etc is also a good piece of > information. Yes, all interesting things... > - An important observation is that there is an enormous difference > in the > length of people's names. It is nice to vary the size of the font to > adapt to > this. Otherwise just about everyone has a lot of unused space on > their badge. > The longest christian name in 2004 was Jean-Phillipe and the longest > surname > was Nordgård-Hansen. The longest email address was > [EMAIL PROTECTED] As I wrote above, replying to Douglas, this can be scaled down auto- matically, and I'll add another fake EuroPython delegate to my badge samples, soon, to illustrate this. > - I think it is important to keep the amount of information on the > badge > small. Anything that doesn't have a clear function and use should be > removed. > In Edward Tufte's terminology, there shouldn't be any "chart junk". I highly appreciate Tufte, although I have rarely seen any illustra- tions meeting his philosophy that were not created by himself. John Pinner: > However, before we all get carried away and start doing things, can I > remind you that we are trying to produce a conference system that we > can reuse? An excellent idea! I'm very keen about reuse, but I didn't know, some- body else was working on badges. If something else is available, by all means go for it! Still, I think this is an interesting thread of thoughts about this issue. I'll liaise with Richard and try to find out. Regards, Dinu _______________________________________________ Europython-improve mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython-improve
