A new client sent me a Publisher file for badges she wanted to have made. Admittedly, I am not well versed in Publisher, but I am good at figuring things out. And there were definitely some things that needed to be figured out, as my client wasn’t well versed in Publisher either!

For starters, she wanted the badges to have rounded corners and her artwork had squared corners. However, the box at the top didn’t go all the way to the bottom and the box at the bottom didn’t go all the way to the top. Therefore, the top box needed to be rounded at the top but not the bottom and the bottom box needed to be rounded at the bottom but not at the top. Next, the photo that was in the middle of the badge had a white border added with rounded corners, but the photo’s square corners stuck out beyond the white border. We won’t even discuss how many unnecessary layers were hidden and that things weren’t quite lined up as they should have been.

Good grief, what did I get myself into? There was no way I would send this to the printer to be printed as it was, and my client was too busy preparing for her event, so I didn't want to send it back to her. Since I needed to produce some prototypes to send her, I decided to jump in and fix the artwork for her.

First I went to Auto Shapes, selected Basic Shapes and then Rounded Rectangle. I sized the rectangle to fit the top of the badge and matched the background color. After lining it up, I selected the rectangle that was already there and shortened it from the top down until the rounded corners were visible. The two rectangles together gave me rounded corners on top and square corners on the bottom. I did this also on the bottom of the badge except in reverse. This then presented a new problem, since the bottom rectangle was a different size than the top one, the corners didn’t round to the same size. To fix this I added a duplicate rectangle at the bottom and sized it until the corners matched the corners at the top. This layer was then moved to the back so only the rounded corners were visible.

The photo was next. Maybe there is a way to do this in Publisher, but with time constraints working against me, I decided to copy the image and paste it into Word. In Word I used the Picture Tools to change the picture shape to have rounded corners, added the white border, then copied and pasted it back into Publisher.

Lastly, I selected all the components of the badge, then under Arrange, selected Align and Distribute, then Align Center. Voila! Save, and then Save As a jpeg so that I could insert the file into an email to send to her for approval. Once approved, several different laminated prototypes were made for her to choose from. She picked her favorite and then sent me five new Publisher files for the additional designations (all access, exhibitor, etc.) all in the original format for me to do this all over again!

Note: The original badge was changed to a flower show badge for security and privacy reasons.