To print ID cards, you need a few basic things: a card printer, design software, blank cards, and a ribbon. But did you know that your card design can help influence which ribbons you should use?

A single-sided printer like the Magicard Enduro+ uses YMCKO ribbons. This ribbon has three color panels (Y=yellow, M=magenta and C=cyan), a black panel (K) and a clear overlay (O). For a dual-sided printer, you need YMCKOK ribbons, which add an additional black panel for printing on the back of the card.

Unlike a desktop inkjet printer, when you print an ID card you can’t minimize the amount of panels you use—each card will use a full set of YMCKO panels. If your card design is mostly black text with a blue and black logo, you are still using the yellow and magenta panels.

If your cards don’t heavily use color, you may want to consider changing your design and using a black monochrome ribbon. Monochrome ribbons (which come in a variety of colors including black, blue, and red) come with much larger print counts because they aren’t using 5 panels for every card, so you can get 1000 prints per ribbon versus 300. And if you print dual-sided cards and the backs are all text or barcodes, you can pre-print the backs of the cards using a monochrome ribbon so you can print larger batches of cards to save you time.