Conference badges are very useful things. When you can't quite remember the name of that person you see at best once a year, the badge can save you from embarrassment. Badges allow vendors to greet potential customers by name and to know where they are from. Badges make it easy to strike up a casual conversation while waiting in line for a book signing or other event. Badges doall of these things, but only if others can read the wearers name.

Badges suspended on lanyards, especially long lanyards, can be impossible to read. There is a 50 percent chance that a badge will be reversed with the wearer's name on the side facing the wearer's belly. Or the lanyard can be so long that the badge hangs so low that, even though the name is facing outward, another can't read it without getting down on bended knee. I can do without the corporate advertising that makes a lanyard badge twice the size it needs to be and makes every conferee a human billboard. But I cannot do without conferees' names being visible.