Core77

As any corporate employee will tell you, forgetting your ID is the surest way to foul your workday's flow. Getting in and out of the building, the cafeteria, your floor and your office now requires you to wait for security to buzz you in with that tsk-tsk look on their face.

The thin plastic badges we've used to replace their older metal cousins contain far more information and better photos, and any company can plunk down roughly four grand US to produce them; all you need is a simple webcam or digicam, software, and a special printer that can plot accurate barcodes or even encode magnetic strips. Companies like AlphaCard, ZebraCard and Idsupershop sell the printers online, and EasyIDcard offers an online ID-making service for those who don't want to invest in the products themselves.

The printers, alas, leave a little something to be desired in the design department; for the most part they look like Epson printer designers from the '90s taking a stab at early '80s medical equipment.