Student ID Card Generator

What belongs on a coaching centre ID card

An ID card has one job: let a stranger at your gate decide, in about two seconds, whether this person should be walking in. Everything on the card either serves that or gets in the way.

Most centres over-design the front and leave the back blank, which is backwards. The front needs a photo large enough to actually match a face across a desk. The back is where the useful text goes.

• Photo — at least 25mm wide, taken against a plain wall, not a cropped WhatsApp selfie
• Student name, in the largest type on the card after the institute name
• Roll or admission number, which is what you will actually search by
• Batch and academic year, so an old card is obviously old
• Institute name and phone number, for a card handed in by a stranger
• Parent or guardian phone on the back, for emergencies

Printing cards that survive a school bag

The usual failure is not the design, it is the paper. A card printed on ordinary 80gsm paper is soft within a fortnight and unreadable by the end of term.

Print on 250-300gsm card stock and laminate. In most Indian towns a local print shop will laminate a full A4 sheet for a few rupees, which is far cheaper than pouches bought per card.

• Standard size is 85.6 x 54mm — the same as a debit card, so it fits any wallet or pouch
• Print eight or ten to an A4 sheet, laminate the whole sheet, then cut
• Leave 3mm clear inside every edge; a guillotine is never perfectly straight
• Print one card and check it before running the whole batch

Doing a whole batch at once

Filling a form once per student is fine for five cards and miserable for fifty. Paste your list in and the generator lays out the full batch on printable sheets, in the order you pasted it.

Keep the source list somewhere you can edit — a spreadsheet is ideal. Next term you change the year and reprint rather than starting again.

Mistakes that cost you a reprint

Nearly every reprint we hear about comes from one of a small handful of errors, and all of them are caught by printing a single test card first.

• No expiry or academic year, so a student who left two years ago still has a valid-looking card
• Photos at wildly different sizes, which happens when they come from parents over WhatsApp
• An institute phone number that has since changed
• Text too close to the edge, then trimmed off
• Names in all capitals, which is harder to read at a glance than sentence case