The club has professionally made hard plastic badges, but the class has paper badges that go into clear plastic badge holders.
Badge Holders
As of 2015, we have a large number of magnet backed badge holders. Use those. We also have some pin- backed ones, avoid using those.
If the badge holders break, or get lost, or there aren't enough of them, we need to buy more. For the magnet-backed ones it's probably worth shopping online to bring the price down. Brian got them at Pinless where they're now (2010) up to 90 cents per badge for 4"x3". (There's a cheaper one at 60 cents but the magnet back on those is smaller and easier to lose. We could use them as a source of replacement fronts, though. They also sell replacement magnet backs.)
Making the Badges
There are latex templates for making class badges in the athena locker in /mit/tech-squares/club-private/badges Those put the Tech Squares logo in the corner and are what we've traditionally used and are nice and all, but there are two big caveats:
People have said their biggest problem with the badges is how readable the first names are from far away. The font used in the latex badge template can only be enlarged somewhat before it doesn't fit. Other fonts can fit much better. We (Brian and Sara) experimented with a word processor and various fonts and the longest first name in that year's class until we found one that was the most readable from a distance, and then we increased the size of the font even further for people with shorter names, and got the names to be much much larger. (We ended up using "Dom Casual" with 60pt for the first names and 42pt for the last names. Play around with narrow-but-readable fonts (we also wanted one that seemed friendly-looking) until you get one you like.)
If the size of the badge changes at all you have to adjust the latex document a lot, and it seems like the company that makes them changes them every year, and at that point the ready made latex templates aren't much use since it would be easier to hack at it in a word processor if you're not a latex expert.
So my advice is to do your own thing with the badges. Cally has a two-column Word doc that works fine. She suggests you print two copies of the list of names the first week, and then add a new copy or two when you have the corrections made. Then you can just cut out a new paper copy when a badge is lost or mangled.
The class badges are usually made for the second or third week of class. If some people drop out after they're made, it's not a big deal, you've only wasted a little paper since the plastic part is reusable.