Make your first template

Open the editor

From Templates → New, pick a starter. The gallery groups them by use: schools, corporate, amusement and venues, retail and hospitality, healthcare, events, industrial, community, and passes and members, plus a blank portrait or landscape card. Search by the job or the card you need (“nurse”, “forklift”, “library card”). Every starter shows up in your brand color and organization name, and each is sized for CR-80 (85.6 × 54 mm) with 1 mm bleed on the over-bleed-aware print path. Once you pick one, you’re in the editor.

Schools: pick your state above the gallery. Many states require suicide and crisis hotline numbers on student IDs, and the student ID starters print the lines your state’s law asks for on the back, with a link to the law. Where we found no such law, they carry the national 988 line.

The editor in 60 seconds

• Toolbar top-left: add text, images, photo box, barcode, signature placeholder, shapes.
• Canvas middle: drag layers around. Hold space to pan, scroll to zoom, Cmd/Ctrl + scroll for zoom only.
• Layers panel right: drag to reorder, click to select, search to filter.
• Inspector bottom: properties of the selected layer (font, color, binding, etc.).

Bindings

A text or barcode layer can either show a static string (a department label) or bind to an employee field that swaps per-print. In the inspector, set the Binding:

• first_name, last_name, preferred_name
• position, department, school_year
• employee_id, both as a text label and as a barcode source.

Photos

Add a Photo layer for the employee photo. Set the aspect ratio (3:4 portrait is most common for ID cards), and pick cover (fill the box) or contain(letterbox). BadgeBadger’s cropper enforces this aspect when the operator uploads. Corner radius rounds the photo; half the box width makes a 1:1 photo a circle.

Two-sided cards

Click the Backtab at the top to design the reverse side. Both sides are rendered in a single PDF, front page then back page; duplex printers handle the flip automatically. Print two-sided templates on a duplex printer: a single-sided printer feeds a new card for each page, so the back would come out as a card of its own. The card preview on each employee’s page has Front and Back buttons, so you can check both sides before printing.

Save + lock

Templates auto-save. Once a template has been used to print at least one real badge, it’s locked from edits to prevent accidentally changing the design behind your operator’s back. You can still duplicate it (the duplicate is unlocked) or unlock the original from the editor header.