20 Great Button Badge Design Ideas - Part 3

Part Three of our guide to button badge design takes in politics, branding, art, education and partying - demonstrating just how broad the possible uses for badges are.

#11 Everything's Political

Are you interested in sloganeering or electioneering? If you have a point to make or a campaign message to push, the humble badge has always been on hand to help.

When designing political badges your first design consideration is the size of the badge. A small badge is usually thought of as more fashionable, and therefore more widely wearable than a large badge. But a large badge will display your slogan or campaign message much more clearly, and often there is little room for subtlety when it comes to getting your message across.

It may be helpful to think of it this way: if you aim to get a political message across over time by getting as many people to wear your badge as possible, then go for a smaller size (think CND badges). If you are actively fighting a campaign, and need to get your message over right here and now, then go a big size (think ‘Vote So-and-So for President’).

Whatever your politics, remember that hate speech is illegal and is never tolerated. We can do politics but still keep it civilised, right? Beyond that, freedom of expression means you are free to voice your opinions in badge form – but whether anyone listens to you is beyond the job spec of the humble badge!

#12 Brand It Up

Whether you are involved with a business, a charity, or even a darts club, branding is everything!

The importance of branding in modern times seems so obvious as to barely be worth discussing. But the ways in which your brand finds its way in the world may be more subtle than it seems.

The oldest and most important rule regarding branding is consistency. To be consistent, first you need to consider how you want your brand to be received - should your brand register with people as cheeky and irreverent, or trusted and reliable? Do you want to be thought of as spontaneous and carefree, or careful and caring? While it might just be possible for your brand to straddle a couple of different concepts, it is absolutely impossible for a brand to mean everything to everyone, and an attempt to be all things to all people is likely to go horribly wrong. Other brands will simply cut through more effectively and communicate more successfully, leaving your brand appearing confused and directionless. Avoid this by considering your brand in every interaction that you have with your potential customer, and imagine your brand as a structure built by each interaction being placed on top of the other. Each brick should be supportive of the other, or the whole thing collapses! 

To build up the strength of your brand, you need to make sure that it reaches its audience in as undiluted a way as possible. Using a consistent logo, colours, imagery and tone will combine to reinforce your brand at each interaction with the audience. Badges are a great way to communicate with your target audience, and to engage with consumers.

This is where the true power of the badge really comes into play: in its role working with your brand ambassadors. Your brand ambassadors are those existing customers who are already on your side, who like your products or services and are actively willing to share their enthusiasm for your brand with other people. Now, imagine if you were to give each of those people a badge carrying your messaging... well that could be a really powerful tool to help spread the word about your organisation!

#13 Cool Enough for School

Nowhere is the vibrancy and vitality of badge design better recognised than in the corridors and classrooms of the country’s schools.

Colourful, lively, rewarding – the very best of badge design can be seen in the work of schools. A primary school is also surely the only justifiable context for the use of the comic sans font.

The best school designs are fun, without worrying too much about professional conventions. In fact the designs drawn by imaginative school children are often far more interesting than those conjured by a professional designer, and the best approach when preparing the images for print is to change absolutely nothing.

School badges are often used to reward specific achievements or attendance levels, or to celebrate a school event or anniversary. Basing the design around a star or a smiley face is a well used and successful concept, as are gold / silver / bronze levels for a reward scheme. Digitally printed button badges are great for easily allowing multiple designs to be printed without the cost skyrocketing, so printing different years or house colours is also a cinch.

#14 Party Time

There's a Party Going On Right Here.

If I said that it isn’t ever really a party if there are no badges, you might think I have gone a little badge-crazy. Well, you would likely be right, but just a minute, let me explain!

Badges can enhance any party by bringing an additional element of fun. For a birthday celebration, a personalized badge featuring the birthday boy or birthday girl can make the occasion truly special. And remember that you are never too old for a birthday badge!

What stag or hen party would be complete without a memorable badge? An embarrassing photograph of the prospective bride or groom can be used for poking gentle fun, or you could always turn to some of the cliché Learner Plate images but personalized with names and dates.

Weddings can be forever captured in badge form with an image from the wedding in badge form making the perfect accompaniment to a thank you note. On a more sombre level, badges can help to remember someone after a funeral.

Whatever the occasion, don’t forget the badges.

#15 A Walking Work of Art

The relationship between art and badges is a natural one. As a visual medium, any badge can be understood as a walking work of art.

At the most straightforward level, we know that badges are a medium that can carry an artwork. For an artist the badge is another potential canvas for their creativity, or a way of promoting their talents.

However, if we are allowed briefly to get a little metaphysical, we can understand that while the badge carries the artwork, also in many cases the badge itself is the artwork. Rather than just carrying the image of an artist, the badge itself is the creation of the artist. In this respect many artistic badge designers consider the full object when creating the design, how it will be seen from different angles and distances, how the image will operate across the 3D surface, but also how the badge and its imagery links and interacts with the identity of the person wearing it - who they are, and the things about themselves that they are telling the world.

An artist who famously recognised the link between badges and the visual representation of ideas and identities was Peter Blake. In his celebrated pop art painting “Self Portrait with Badges” Blake portrays himself in a denim jacket adorned with badges, the iconography of the union jack and of Elvis Presley mixed in with a sea of other images contained within individual badges. What Blake is working with here is the idea that iconography and identity can be portable, and we drop and pick up different elements of our identity as we pass through life. But although transitory and fleeting in some respects, in other ways popular culture is about creating permanence, about capturing those icons and fixing them to your denim jacket. Pop culture as contained in the badges becomes at once removable and fixed - in the same way as the perfect pop song is one that is transitory and disposable, but also fixes itself in the general consciousness like a cultural time capsule.

That is something of a digression, but the point is that if you are an artist you could consider the badge as a unique means to capture a piece of visual culture – and then disseminate it to the masses!

Or you can conclude it’s just a badge and the rest is pretentious nonsense, it is up to you.