Art Direction? Sometimes Cute Just Doesn’t Get You Where You Want to Go…
I’m heading out to my magical hometown of Buffalo, NY today for holiday fun via Southwest Airlines. Upon printing out my e-ticket, I happened to notice a link to a section of their website providing information about their latest boarding procedures. The link took me to a sub-site of Southwest called “Boarding School,” which looked like this:
Sure, it’s cute – its faux notebook look and the fudged bic pen drawings of tickets and planes and stars are just….um…adorable….but obviously the designer didn’t have a broad demographic of travelers in mind. While a design like this would certainly be appropriate for a t-shirt company that distributes to Urban Outfitters, I’m not sure it’s the best communication design for an instructional sub-site of a major (albeit discount) airline.
I have never flown Southwest before. While I’m sure it will be fine (as in I probably won’t plummet to my untimely death over the Rockies), a boarding procedure site decorated in this juvenile manner threatens to wreck my confidence long before I ever board the damn plane. All I can say is I hope my boarding pass doesn’t look like this:
If it does, I’ll probably head on over to one of the other airline ticket desks and inquire about flying standby…..
On December 20th, 2007, Mark said:
I’m flying Southwest this weekend and look forward to this experience. How far have they taken their “back to school” theme? I hope they don’t hit my knuckles with a ruler for getting up when the seatbelt light is on.
On December 20th, 2007, Administrator said:
no one hit my knuckles with a ruler, but the boarding process is like a giant game of capture the flag…or someone’s sick idea of a social experiment…
On December 22nd, 2007, Jeremy Anderson said:
It’s comforting to know that information design isn’t dangerous.