My thinking about credit card design began earlier this year with the post “What’s This? CV2 / Credit Card Security Code”. I realized then that there was still more work to do, and took a shot at redesigning the whole thing.

On the whole, credit cards are pretty ugly, congested things. That’s a result of the combination of a) needing to convey a ton of information in a confined space, and b) designers who probably knew or cared relatively little about visual or business design. Let’s give this a shot.

First, for reference, some “before” photos I scraped from Google Images:

The cards I own generally have the following features:

Front: Credit Card Number, Expiration Date, Name, Cardholder Since, Visa Logo, a thousand different conflicting colors and logos from my bank.

Back: Magnetic strip, signature area, my signature, the last four numbers of the card, a hologram, the confusing cv2 thing, more logos, three different phone numbers, a website, some number jargon in the top corner, the copy “Not valid unless signed,” the bank’s site URL.

For my design, I decided to go with a minimalist approach. Not just because I think it generally makes good design sense, but because it looks so unlike any other card I’ve ever seen—and that’d make it fun and attractive.

Front side:

Quite a departure, right?

Notable design decisions:

1. I started with a blank slate, and added back only what I felt was absolutely, positively necessary. You might even argue that the only item that falls into this category is the credit card number. I contemplated a design like that. However, thinking about how the credit card is generally used, I feel that including the expiration date and CV2 number make a more effective design. Specifically: The use case of buying products online. With this card, you won’t have the painful (I mean, “painful”) use experience of having to flip the card over to find vital purchasing details. This design makes it intuitively obvious what the expiration date and CV2 number are, without requiring help text which clutters up the card. You don’t need your name on the front of the card, because you don’t (at least, shouldn’t) need to use the card as a reference to remember what your name is.
2. It may be a little bit of a leap for a stodgy finance company like Visa, but I don’t think you need any logos on the front of the card. The design should speak for itself about what your brand is. Ever notice how you’ve never once seen an Apple logo on the front of an iPhone? You still know it’s an iPhone, right?
3. I thought it would look awesome if the card numbers were punched out cleanly, rather than just imprinted. Purely aesthetic, stylistic choice that seemed like it would look and feel bad ass. I could certainly be wrong, but my impression is that the imprinted card numbers thing became the norm because merchants originally used carbon paper contraptions like this in order to record your data. It’s possible that modern ATM machines wouldn’t recognize this new style, in which case, we stick with the universally accepted standard. If we didn’t have to cater to these ATM standards at all, it might have been fun to experiment with entirely new shapes. Perhaps a smaller square with a standard-size hole punched in so that you could easily wear the card on your keychain? That raises an entirely different set of design issues…it was just a thought.

Back Side:

Notable design decisions:

1. Obviously, if the vital numbers are punched through, you’ll still see them when you flip the card over.
2. On the cards I have on hand, the hologram generally seems to be at least partly overlapping with the imprinted numbers. My guess is this is some kind of tactic to impede forgery, so I stuck with it.
3. Hey! There’s my name! So if I need to find it, and prove that I’m me, here it is. Furthermore, my understanding is that when a cashier is cross-referencing my credit card to my ID, he wants to investigate that both the name matches and that the signature matches. Now he doesn’t have to flip the card back and forth to see both.
4. My signature here has been printed directly onto the card. As a result, we don’t need that ugly multi-color signature space, and we don’t need any explanatory text to remind us that “card is not valid unless signed.” My intuition is that a digitally reproduced copy of my signature is acceptable—the DMV does this on my Driver’s License, and there doesn’t seem to be any concern about validity there.
5. Took a little creative liberty with the Visa logo. Hopefully they’d be cool with this look.
6. I’m not totally sure why the back of every card I’ve looked at has a reproduction of the last four digits of your credit card number along with the CV2 code. I’m just going to assume that it has to be there. Furthermore, per my original CV2 post, every single website ever has those instructions that point clueless users to where their CV2 code is located. It would be a horrible user experience if, somehow, you managed to miss the numbers on the front by following the site instructions, and found that help text pointed to nothing on your card. So for the sake of those hopeless people, I’m leaving the numbers here in tact.
7. All the rest of the vitals crap is stuffed away above the magnetic strip. I think much of it is unnecessary, but imagine that this isn’t a battle I’d be able to win against corporate. The name “Visa Black Card” really ought to be intuitive enough to search in Google or by phone that I shouldn’t need to state it here. Same goes for the web address. Every card seems to have some kind of serial number jammed into a corner, so I’m assuming this stays. The phone number I accept as inherently useful—though I think it’s silly that the card should explain that it’s a “24-hour customer service line.” If it was an 8am-5pm line, I’d need the advisory note. But saying that the number works 24 hours isn’t going to affect my usage behavior at all.

I microwave a TON of soup. Soup is one of my favorite foods.

Think about how microwaving food is supposed to work:

1. Put all your stuff in a microwave-safe container
2. Turn the microwave on for the allotted time
3. Microwave dings
4. Take it out and enjoy

How it works in reality: Step (4), according to the instructions on the can which nobody has ever read, ever, is technically “let your stuff sit for a minute to cool off, then grab it.” I emphasize technically. Because in practice, it’s “burn your hands just trying to move the bowl to the kitchen table and probably spill a bit on the floor because it’s hot and you’re rushing.”

You know what I decided I wanted? A microwavable soup bowl with a handle.

Seriously. Just add a handle. That’s the rocket science. Sort of like how you can lift a pot of boiling water off a stove top burner without a visit to the emergency room.

So I use this thing. Mine is orange. I don’t think the designers anticipated people eating directly from it, but I don’t care. I think it’s brilliant. I heat a bowl of soup, the microwave dings, and I chow down on that sucker.

A few other added benefits that I’ve noticed post-facto:

1. Between steps (2) and (3), your food has probably exploded all over the inside of the microwave for you to clean later. This thing comes with a lid. Problem completely solved. No more kitchen appliance interior decorating.
2. It’s totally oversized. Which is great. It’s not like I was running out of space inside my microwave or my food was claustrophobic or something. What’s more important is the strange fact that Campbell’s generally sells soups in sizes like “10.75 ounces” and Target generally sells bowls in sizes like “six inches” and it’s awfully difficult to tell whether the one will fit inside the other. I used to fill six-inch soupbowls up to the tippy-top, which I’d inevitably spill either because I’m a klutz or, again, the microwave has turned the bowl to molten lava temperatures. This thing: no problem.

I suppose the jury is still out on the prevalence of mouth burns now that the preliminary hand burn has been bypassed. I’d argue that there are more clues for food (steam, bubbly water, heat, etc.) than for plastic in judging appropriate temperatures. No scalded taste buds for me yet.

Calibri is a nice font. I’m glad Microsoft Office made the transition.

But there’s one part that annoys the bejeezus out of me. It’s the “~” key. The Tilde.

I like to approximate things. So, for example, if I’ve just played prolific amounts of the world’s suckiest sport, I might say this:

But that’s only if I was playing the world’s suckiest sport sometime prior to 2007, when Times New Roman was the Office default font.

If I’d tried to be like Mike today:

Eww eww eww eww eww.

It started out as http://www.cocacola.com

Then the internet got smarter; www.cocacola.com was all that you really needed.

Then the internet got smarter still. cocacola.com would direct you to the right place.

Then we got cutesy. Things like google.com/fanhaerhr became google.com/about .

Cuter still, with the need to mind your messages down to the very character. You can get to facebook.com by simply typing fb.me .

There’s an ever-blossoming number of different domains now. The US has  .com; most countries with robust internet access have their own alternative like .es, .it, .co.uk, or whatever. Having a .org address used to mean something different. Now there’s .co, .info, .biz, .xxx, and who knows what else.

I imagine that, eventually, you might have every different permutation of domains. Cocacola.com might become cocaco.la (like delicious.com used to be del.icio.us).

This seems silly though. Does CocaCola need to own every single different iteration of its namesake, across dozens (hundreds?) of different domains? How long until you can just own “CocaCola,” and just type “CocaCola” into a browser and that’s where you go? Some browsers already do this by taking advantage of your browsing history, or doing tricks with Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” function.

But I mean, I’m talking the real deal. I want to own “Josh Petersel;” how long until that’s possible?

What in the world does the light on top of the cab even mean?

It says “TAXI.” Sometimes the light is on. In some cities, when the light is on, it means “available.” Other cities, when the light is off it means “available.” I think. I don’t know. I don’t get it at all.

So why doesn’t it look like this:

If the light is on, I can read that the sign says “available.” It’s available. Why did we need to be reminded that the bright yellow car with the word “Taxi” plastered on both sides is, in fact, a taxi?

Not that this change ever gets implemented—even though it’d be easy and cheap to roll out, and makes the user experience simply better. The cab companies are probably far busier throwing hissy fits at startups like Uber and Sidecar who saw the same problem (“Why the hell can’t I find an available cab anywhere?”) and came up with far more complicated (yet, admittedly, effective) solutions.