F8 Conference Badges

I love when innovative thinking is put into mundane things you see all the time. These are interesting, well thought out and very nicely designed by the in-house team at Facebook. Via fonts in use.

The conference badge is a challenging design conundrum. John D. Berry duly likens them to highway signs in this Font magazine article. How do we create a template for names which vary widely in length, while making each one legible enough to reduce the chances of an awkward chest gaze?
The in-house design team at Facebook, including Ben Barry and Everett Katigbak, engineered one of the more innovative solutions in their tags for last year’s f8, the Facebook developer conference.

“When we were first talking about the booklets and badges we had a bunch of Field Notes journals laying around that our friends at Gowalla had sent over. We immediately thought it would be a good booklet size and thought too it was a good size for a badge. Never wanting to take the easy way out we decided to go for it and make the badge and booklet one piece.” — Ben Barry

The typeface is the Narrow width of Facebook’s identity face, Vista Sans. Xavier Dupré’s informal design sets a friendly tone for the event, and its open aperture and extra large lowercase let names be read at a quick glance from a distance before resorting to the ol’ now who am I talking to here? stare at close range. Be sure to check out the rest of Ben’s work. He does nice things with type.