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More Pass Than Fail: Reimagining the Boarding Ticket

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No matter how smoothly Ryan Bingham can hop from curbside to gate in Up in the Air, the efficacy of air travel is hindered by a little something called a boarding pass — flimsy, sateen pieces of paper with shoddy perforations and a confusing mishmash of numbered information. You know the drill: where did that thing go?  Do I need my driver’s license yet? Nope, that’s a receipt. Crap! The flap tore off. I swear, this airport is more crowded than ever. Design, on the other hand, is meant to solve problems. Asking and answering his own brief to create a better boarding pass, Squarespace creative director Tyler Thompson has innovated some damned good ideas.

Thompson’s take on the existing boarding pass layout for Delta Airlines:

It was like someone put on a blindfold, drank a fifth of whiskey, spun around 100 times, got kicked in the face by a mule, and then just started puking numbers and letters onto the boarding pass at random (yes, I realize that a human didn’t lay this out, if a human had, judging by the train-wreck of design, they would have surely used Papyrus). There was nothing given size or color importance over anything else, it was a mess.

Exhibit A:

pass-top-text

Thompson then laid out the need-to-know information when embarking on a trip through the airport: first, which flight, then which gate, then the seat, next the boarding zone, as well as a separate demarcation for the time (since it’s the most singular obsession when boarding a flight). He came up with two iterations of a newly-designed pass:

pass-designed

boardingpass

The second of which can be easily branded to a particular airline by adding color and logos:

pass-color-1

pass-blue-1

What do you think, dear readers? Pipe dream or feasible vision for a new age in design?

In the meantime, peep loads more of Thompson’s design work on his blog, New to York.

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Comments (4)

Hooray! Northwest, Comair, Delta, are you paying attention?

I had a dream that I used one of these last night and I was really excited about it.

Too much ink. Imagine the cost of printing out 2.5 million of these every year.

Each design has elements that I like and elements that I don’t. I would love to see another iteration with a focus on reducing ink levels (e.g., the full graphic of the US is unnecessarily wasteful in the first design, as is the main black stripe in the second design). Also, the first design would need modification for international flights. Still a huge improvement, though. Nice work!

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