This design process was a bit more challenging than I knew it was going to be. I found that redesigning the boarding pass helped me to start thinking more like a designer. Usually, I only consider visual aesthetics when designing something, since my background is in photography. I struggle with including type in my designs, so last week’s lecture + this exercise was useful in getting me to think about how type can be used to communicate with people in a way that’s visually appealing and efficient.
My design process can be broken down into three sections: Color, Composition, and Type.
Color
I started by looking at the Delta logo to figure out how I could use colors to make different parts of the boarding pass pop. I used this website to find the Delta pantone colors, and inputed the CMYK values into Photoshop to get Delta Blue and Delta Red, which form the basis of the entire boarding pass.
I created a gradient in Photoshop using the two colors and used it to separate the top of the boarding pass from the rest of it. I also created a background gradient on the ticket itself with red (to contrast the logo’s blue wording). After this, I really started to think about layout.
Layout
This was the first iteration of the grid system I wanted to use for the boarding pass. I originally thought that I would use vertical boxes to separate passenger information and flight information, so it would be easy to locate necessary information. I set up two blue boxes, each with low opacity, so that I could organize the words on top. The box on the right would be the part of the ticket that could be torn off, and would repeat the information from the other two boxes.
I switched to a fully horizontal layout and grouped everything together based on what was relevant to one another. I chose to do a separate bar distinguished by a darker gray background for essential passenger information. I tried to use information that I most commonly refer to at the airport, and more importantly, information I would get pissed off if it wasn’t easily visible. The airport can be really stressful and tiring, and I wanted to keep that in mind while designing, and remember that these people don’t care about how cute it looks, they just want their information and they want to go. Maybe they want to take a cute Instagram story with their passport and boarding pass. For those people, I kept the aesthetics and branding in mind through color.
This was the final layout of the text on the boarding pass.
Text
Choosing the typeface was pretty straightforward. I used the same website that I used for the Delta pantones to find the official Delta font: Whitney. I downloaded Whitney in 6 different editions from font.download and used Whitney Semibold for the whole boarding pass. Each “category” (ex: DEPARTS) is written in 6pt font and is bolded, while the corresponding information (ex: 12:30 PM) is written in 5pt font. The small information under the flight number and passenger name is written in 3pt font, since it’s not relevant to the passenger, but is more for an airline employee, who would be trained to know where all the information on the boarding pass would be. I increased the tracking to 40 to make everything a little easier to read. I also stayed in all caps to make the information easier to read.