Custom lanyards with the best customer service

We’re always looking for new and inventive uses for custom lanyards and today we’ve stumbled across one that has us rather intrigued.

In Hollywood, the duration between the time movies hit theaters to the time they reach viewers’ houses on disc is growing shorter, fueled by the speed of technology and the Internet. It was only a couple of years ago that DVD was the standard method of bringing movies home. That was achieved by buying a movie on DVD or renting one at a local rental store like Blockbuster. Now, Blu-ray is taking over for DVD and instant-access services like Netflix and Redbox kiosks are taking over for physical rental stores.

Now a company called PortoMedia has developed a kiosk that allows consumers to simply plug in a USB flash drive and walk away with a digital movie rental stored safely on the device.

According to CNET News:

The kiosks will be packed with hard drives that can hold 350 to 5,000 titles. Users then plug in a memory device from the company, enter a PIN code, and buy or rent a movie. When consumers get home, they simply slide the memory device into a dock connected to a TV.

So we thought: What better way could there be to carry your rental movies around than on a custom lanyard? To make the system work, PortoMedia has developed a faster-than-normal USB interface that makes the movie transfer happen in a matter of seconds. It seems to us that USB flash drives for this device should be safely stored on custom lanyards around the user’s neck.

Or, better yet, what if Hollywood starts to adopt this technology and release movies in stores on USB drives rather than on disc? Each movie could come with its own custom lanyard sporting the logo and tagline for the film. Unlike discs, these USB drives and lanyards could become collector’s items in addition to being convenient ways to deliver content.

We like to see technology moving forward and enjoy it even more when it involves lanyards!

It surprises many of our customers to learn that custom lanyards are truly what they sound like: custom.

Designing and creating custom lanyards is so much more than simply choosing a style, attachment, and some words to print. We can actually produce nearly any idea you can think of for your custom lanyards.

The first step in creating custom lanyards is dyeing your lanyard to any color. Yes, when we say “any color,” we do mean any color at all. While some companies may restrict the color of custom lanyards to a few stock colors, we don’t see a reason to limit your creativity. You can review some standard colors here, but don’t think those are the only material colors we can produce. Whether you want to match your school colors or the specific Pantone value in your company’s logo, it can be done with our custom lanyards.

Once the color has been decided for your custom lanyards, the design is added, either via a printing technique or by actually weaving it into the material. No matter the process, custom lanyards can feature any text with any font and/or any graphic or logo that you specify. Some techniques are better for certain designs than others, so review our list of different styles of custom lanyards to get a feel for what you’re looking for.

If you have an idea of a logo or design you’d like to see added to custom lanyards but can’t design it yourself or don’t know where to get it, our experienced artists can always help. We can quickly mock up your design and send you the digital artwork depicting what your custom lanyards will look like when they are produced. We’ve done it for hundreds of customers and we’ll be happy to do it for you.

So what else puts the “custom” in custom lanyards?

In addition to the material and design style, you can specify the width, length, and thickness of custom lanyards. We generally produce common numbers like 36″ length, 3/4″ width, and 0.6mm thickness, but you can feel free to give us any dimensions you’d like for your custom lanyards.

Once we’ve produced the material for custom lanyards, it’s time to affix the attachments. You might call them hooks, clasps, clamps, or fittings. We like to refer to all of these as attachments – and we have hundreds of them available for use on custom lanyards. You can see a sampling of our most popular attachments here, but that’s certainly not all of them. If you need a special color, size, or shape of any of those attachments, just let us know and we’ll likely be able to produce them for you.

In the end, creating custom lanyards means you’re the boss.

And while deciding on a design for custom lanyards may seem overwhelming at first, it’s really quite easy. We can work with you to determine the most appropriate style, size, and other specifics depending on what you’ll be using your custom lanyards for. If you’re still not sure how you want the final version of your custom lanyards to look, we’ll be happy to send you as many revisions of digital artwork you need until you find the perfect fit.

If you’ve read this far, you must be interested in ordering custom lanyards. The easiest way to get started is to simply fill out our price quote request form. Submit your details and ideas to us there and we’ll send e-mail you back with a quote and digital preview of your lanyards within a few minutes.

Custom lanyards are becoming increasingly popular in schools. With many requiring their students, teachers, and faculty to wear name tag lanyards or id badge lanyards, it’s often the case that schools want to customize the way their lanyards look. Whether it’s for elementary, middle school, high school, or colleges and universities, custom lanyards by Lanyard Lab are a perfect way to show school spirit.

Each of our custom lanyard styles allows for complete customization. We can (and often do) custom dye the lanyards to match school colors. In addition, a school’s name, mascot, logo, team name, slogan, or any other text or graphic can be added to the lanyard, either via printing or woven into the material.

The most popular styles of lanyards for schools are our Printed Polyester and Printed Tube materials. Both styles feature strong polyester threads high-quality silk screen printing. The flat polyester printed lanyards offer larger widths which allow for more print detail. The tube polyester printed lanyards are available in smaller widths, for schools interested in being more subtle with their design. Tube lanyards are also less expensive for budget-minded schools. The minimum order for either style is just 100 lanyards.

In addition, we have a variety of lanyard attachments that offer a great deal of choice to fit any situation or purpose. For name tag and id badge lanyards, most schools prefer the J-Hook or Bulldog Clip attachments coupled with a business card-size badge holder. For those schools that don’t require name tags or IDs to be worn, key rings are often added to the lanyards to allow students and teachers to safely keep track of their keys while letting the lanyard material hang out of a pocket, showing off the customization.

For school lanyards, we highly recommend adding a safety breakaway. Breakaway lanyards are recommended to ensure the safety of all students, especially younger ones. If a breakaway lanyard is tugged on or becomes caught on something, the lanyard will come free from around the neck. Safety breakaways prevent choking. For all of our styles, the flat plastic and Velcro breakaways are available. For thinner lanyards, we also offer a small, round plastic breakaway.

As you can see from the custom lanyard artwork pictured here, Lanyard Lab offers complete customization and control over the look of custom school lanyards, creating lanyards that are 100% unique to each school.

To get custom lanyards for your school, simply click the button here to request a price quote today:

In reading about activities leading up to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games, one particularly interesting lanyard-related bit of information caught my eye.

This Huffington Post article details how social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.) will have an impact on reporting on the upcoming Winter Olympic Games. As the article points out, while these forms of online media existed for the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, these outlets were somewhat stifled by the fact that the events were taking place in China.

With the 2010 Winter Games taking place in Canada, expectations are that everyday folks will be flooding the Internet with realtime messages detailing everything that goes on in and around the sporting events.

Traditionally, media covering giant-sized events like the Olympic Games need to be properly credentialed. But perhaps not for these 2010 Winter Games.

From huffingtonpost.com:

…there is True North Media House, a strictly online media centre, with a DIY accreditation – literally, anyone can print their own pass using their template and bring their own lanyards.

This media house is encouraging anyone to engage in being part of social media. No need to be employed by a national or international news outlet. Simply start up a blog and print your own media badge at home!

And, of course, you can make yourself (and your team of fellow bloggers) look even more official with some custom lanyards, featuring the name and web address of your blog.

In my time working at Orlando Attractions Magazine, I accumulated quite a few media badges and lanyards. Most were the Printed Polyester or Printed Tube style with a business card-size badge holder.

So if you’re thinking about joining the social media revolution to cover the 2010 Winter Olympic Games for your web site (or any other event for that matter), it seems like good starting point might be to request a quote from us for some custom lanyards to give yourself that added boost of legitimacy.

We’re regularly improving the Lanyard Lab web site, adding clearer descriptions of our lanyard styles, more custom lanyards pictures, and more functionality to help guide you through the process of ordering lanyards.

Whenever we do add anything, we’ll post here to let you know.

In the process, it’s necessary for us to check that our updates look the same across all of the major web browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

We’re Mac people at Lanyard Lab and don’t always have access to a Windows computer running Internet Explorer. So to test there, we’ve been using a free online service called Browsershots. It lets users pick from which browsers they’d like to see screenshots of their web site. The screenshots then reveal any design flaws present in various browser versions.

Unfortunately, while it gets the job done, Browsershots is often very slow to produce the necessary screenshots. It relies on various computers around the world to visit the submitted web site and grab and upload images of it. It can take upwards of an hour during busy times.

There’s also a fantastic site called Browser Sandbox that lets you  emulate multiple browsers quickly, but it’s Windows-only (for now).

So I ask: Does anyone know of a better/faster service for testing a web site across multiple browsers? More importantly, is there on that’s Mac-compatible?

Update (2/7/10): Adobe to the rescue. A much better solution to this problem can be found at browserlab.adobe.com. This Flash-based site quickly and easily displays just about any specified web address in all of the most common versions of the most popular web browsers. Thanks, Adobe!