ID cards & identity.

Most schools outsource ID cards to a print shop once a year, hand over a spreadsheet and a folder of photos, and wait two weeks. A student who joins in week three waits until next year, or carries nothing.

YESS brings the whole thing in-house. The school designs its card once in a visual studio — at the exact physical size of a bank card, with a front and a back — and the platform fills in each holder's photo, name, matricule, class and QR from the live student and staff records. A new enrolment can carry a card the same afternoon. The design is reusable, the data is always current, and the printing is a button.

Design the card once; the platform fills in every holder.

The day-to-day work happens at /dashboard/id-cards. A segmented switch picks the audience — students, staff, or parents — each with a live count. A summary line reads the issuance ledger: so many of so many issued · so many still need a card. Filters narrow the list by campus and, for students, by class.

The person list shows each holder with their photo, name, identifier, class or department, and a badge that reads Issued, Reissued, or Needs card. Tick the people you want and the right-hand pane renders their card live — using the school's active design for that audience, front and back. From there it is three actions: Print (straight to paper or the OS print dialog), Export PNG (a single image, or a zip when you select many), and Export PDF (one card per page, sized in millimetres). Every person you print is stamped into the issuance ledger automatically.

The designs themselves live in the studio at /dashboard/id-cards/studio — a library with three columns, one per audience. New design opens a gallery: pick one of the layouts (classic landscape, modern banner, split panel, portrait lanyard, staff badge, parent pickup and more) crossed with a theme (heritage navy, royal purple, midnight and a dozen others), and the studio seeds a fully-built card you can refine.

Opening a design drops you into the canvas editor at /dashboard/id-cards/studio/[id]. The canvas is the real thing: a CR80 / ISO ID-1 card — 85.6 by 54 millimetres — laid out in true millimetres, with a separate front and back face. You drag elements onto it from a palette of building blocks: a kente stripe, the school logo, the recipient photo, the recipient name and ID, a free-form field binding, a QR code, a barcode, text, a footer block, and a signature stamp. The full element model spans fourteen types in all.

Editing is precise. Elements move and resize with eight handles, snap to a half-millimetre grid (hold Shift to bypass), show alignment guides against the page edges and each other, and nudge by arrow key. There is fifty steps of undo and redo, duplicate, and z-order layering. The properties panel splits into three tabs — Layout (position and size in mm, rotation, layer), Style (font, weight, alignment, colour, opacity), and Content (the type-specific options for the selected element).

A card design is a template, not a finished card. The personal elements fill themselves from each holder's record through tokens — {{recipient.full_name}}, {{recipient.class_name}}, {{recipient.department}}, {{recipient.photo_url}}, and identity fields like blood type and emergency contact — plus school-level tokens for the name, logo, motto and academic year. In the studio they resolve to sample values; at print they resolve to the real person in front of you.

The identifier on the card — and the value behind its QR or barcode — is the holder's matricule: a student's student-ID, a staff member's employee-ID, a parent's parent-ID, each generated by the school's own numbering scheme. The photo is whatever is on the holder's profile.

The QR element offers three payload modes. The default is a human-readable payload — the school name, the holder's name, and their ID — which always renders something meaningful. A verify-URL mode and a signed attendance mode exist for integration scenarios; both are honestly noted as not yet wired end-to-end, in the roadmap below. The barcode element draws a barcode motif but does not yet encode a real scannable symbology — treat it as a visual placeholder for now.

A school can keep as many drafts as it likes, but exactly one design is active per audience — the one the issuing desk uses to render and print. Set active on a design publishes it and clears the previous default in the same move; the database enforces the rule with a one-active-per-audience constraint, so there is never ambiguity about which card a student gets.

Designs carry a version number and a draft / published state, and the library badges each card accordingly — a gold Active template marker on the live one, a Draft marker on the rest. Saving a design today updates it in place; a full immutable version history is scaffolded in the schema but not yet wired, and is called out plainly in the roadmap.

Printing is a batch operation done from the issuing desk: select an audience, tick the holders — or select all — and print, export to PNG, or export to PDF. The whole render happens in the browser from the active design, so there is no print-shop round trip and no server queue to wait on.

Each holder you print is written to the issuance ledger. The first print records the card as issued, with who issued it and when. Reprinting the same holder upserts the same record to reissued, increments a reissue counter, and stamps the last-printed time — so the school always knows who has a card, how many times it has been reprinted, and when. The ledger keeps a snapshot of the holder's name and identifier and the design used, so the record stays legible even if the person or the design later changes.

The ID-cards page carries a second tab — Documents — for the short official letters a school is forever asked to produce: an enrolment confirmation, an attendance certificate, a leaving letter, a fee-clearance letter, and a generic staff letter. Pick the type, pick the student or staff member, and the letter renders with the school's letterhead, ready to print.

The studio, the active-design model, the issuance ledger and bulk print all ship today. The items below are scaffolded or partial, and are flagged honestly so you can plan around them.

An ID card is a printed view of who a person is in the school, so it draws on records, branding, and the credential pipeline next door.