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Comment by reddiric | Hacker News Reader

Great job putting together a prototype. Although I'm going to list specific complaints, I appreciate the effort in creating and risk in sharing, so good job and thanks.

- I don't follow the circle photo fad. It seems like an unnecessary complication (implementation and design element)

- By moving information to the back, you're assuming that the facilities which create these badges have the ability to do double-sided prints on the badges, and if they have the technical ability that it won't increase the time or work required to print a badge.

- You're assuming that the badge printer can print completely to the edge.

- Removing the "Employee" text and relying on the blue color is an accessibility problem (color-blind people need this information)

- Customizing your badge photo adds security policy complications.

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* Almost every badge printer in modern existence prints to the edge. * Printing on the back does present a costly proposition, not only does the printer need a flipper, but you have to use more costly ribbons to do it with.

> Printing on the back does present a costly proposition, not only does the printer need a flipper, but you have to use more costly ribbons to do it with.

Not necessarily. I done some badge printing for a very large organisation about 8 years ago. Our office alone had >2,000 people. I bought both single-sided and duplex card printers. The ones with the duplexing units were only marginally more expensive than the single-sided ones. They all used the same dye-sub ribbon (if it has a duplexer - "flipper" - it doesn't need a special ribbon, it prints one side, flips, then prints the other).

Granted, double sided printing meant each card used twice the ribbon. The dye-sub ribbon was laid out in 5 consecutive panels - C, M, Y, K and UV coat (with an optional sixth foil/fluorescent/hologram panel).

Ultimately, we had our card supplier (a very large smartcard/USIM supplier) pre-print our card backgrounds before cutting the cards and personalising (writing the card certificate) so our remote branch offices could use very cheap printers to print only a low-res photo and text content.

Our printers were <£1k each. They had integrated magstripe encoders and smartcard+contactless interfaces.

Microsoft has bags of money; they're not a small business. They'd be able to set up an in-house printer without blinking. Once you're set up, individual card costs are trivial.

Current Microsoft employee badge has a chip and print on the back, including to the edge printing.

The text on the back (card ID number and such) all comes with the card, Microsoft doesn't print it on.

About the blue color and color-blindness problem...

It depends on the colors badges can be, apart from blue. If they can be yellow or green... that might be a problem because of tritanopia and tritanomaly. But I only know of blue and orange badges. So true... those orange badges might appear red to someone with tritanopia... but he's not going to mistake a blue badge with an orange-red one.

You are still right for the fully achromats out there. But a shading level difference between the orange and the blue badge could be enough. Otherwise, a simple indicative letter is enough (E for employees, I for interns and C for contractors would be more than enough).

Again... if there are more than two colors for those badges (green, yellow, red?) the problem of relying on color to convey information could be more problematic.

You are still right for the fully achromats out there

If you're catering to the extremely rare achromats, there's a heap of accessibility options you should be considering first, including braille for blind people.

> If you're catering to the extremely rare achromats, there's a heap of accessibility options you should be considering first, including braille for blind people.

In the general population, blind people may outnumber achromats, but in the tech worker population, I'd say that relationship is inverse.

An achromat can usually manage to be productive in an office setting, often without alerting others to their condition.

Blind people have it much much harder and thus are less represented at a large tech firm like Microsoft.

Red and green exist for sure (red for "Not really a badge", green for a-dashes if I remember correctly).

Sun badges hung major axis vertical, picture top for employees; major axis horizontal, picture left for contractors.

amazon badges have your alias in Comic Sans, just to troll you.

Qualcomm badges have a large T for contractors, N for non-US citizens, for example. Both are on colored backgrounds so you can tell by color or letter.

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