Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

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Boarding passes are printed on thermal printers, which are exclusively monochrome. Thermal printing is the perfect technology for ephemeral bits of paper like boarding passes and tickets. The printers are compact, fast and phenomenally reliable, require essentially zero maintenance and have no consumables other than the ticket itself.

This redesign would require full bleed CMYK printing, which is none of those things.

This is a perfect example of why business people tend to ignore designers and regard them as jumped-up decorators. If you're going to suggest that someone changes the way they do business, at least have the courtesy to find out why they do things that way. If you're not trying to solve a real problem, then you're a stylist, not a designer.

As far as airlines are concerned, boarding passes are a solved problem and have been for decades. These supposedly simple changes would cost them millions in equipment upgrades and reduce the reliability and throughput of their ticketing systems, for no obvious gain.

Check out Timoni West's design, which takes these things into account: http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-p...

Note that she wrote this in January, 2010.

Sure, and it looks nice.. but it still appears to be based on guessing what airline/airport employees do and about their concerns or constraints. How can you know whether a design is better if you haven't even talked to the client?

No CMYK is required. There is black and a spotcolor. Any company worth their salt alo carries a PMS (or Pantone) spotcolor. Example KLM PMS 299 see http://hansstol.totaldesign.nl/nl/klm.html

This means the tickets could be pre-printed with one spotcolor and have the variable info thermo-printed on that. (The design features variable info such as destination in color. That is not possible. Variable white text inside the color isn't possible as well because the color has to be pre-printed).

Nice design. With just a little tweaks it would work well, me thinks.

Black and a spot colour if you redesign the redesign. As it stands, there is text in three colours - black, an off-grey, the spot colour and white.

Not sure if you're kidding, but the Off grey is created by using a percentage of the black ink.

Thermal printers are not high-resolution enough to make grey text. You'd have too few dots in a letter to make them readable.

Thanks, so that would make it black+spot color base and thermal for variables.

No, you don't understand printing. Thermal is strictly monochrome, it doesn't do shades of grey. The dot-matrix elements have only just enough resolution for text and are incapable of rendering legible halftone type.

I have no idea why your answer comes in above the other one that was provided hours earlier and said the same thing. Also that one did not make a negative comment ('you don't understand printing').

If you care to click on my username you'll find my blog regarding pre-press, printing and implementing ISO for graphic design and print. Other than that I welcome you to read my article on Smashing Magazine '10 Pre-Press Tips For Perfect Print Publishing' http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/10/27/10-pre-press-tips... Cheers.

I feel like we must have read different articles. Here's what the OP had to say about colour printing: "Print limitations (airports seem to have crazy basic print machines, colour may be an ideal but not a realistic ask)"

He certainly seems aware that this might be an issue. Indeed, when you look at the designs, you see that the information generated at pass issue time is either black or one other colour. Thermal printers are already capable of this, as I suspect the OP is aware. So no, the redesign does not require full bleed CMYK printing.

"This is a perfect example of why business people tend to ignore designers and regard them as jumped-up decorators."

Uh huh...

A good point, could there be a color background which the thermal printer prints on top of? Even if that's not possible from the full examples it looks like most of the color is branding related so could be converted to black and white.

Yes, this is pretty common for printers installed in service desks at the airport. However, they tend to not have overly-branded stock because in the irregular circumstances you tend to get a pass from a service desk, you might be rebooked on a different carrier, and would therefore have a mismatched boarding pass.

I see your point, but with this kind of thinking we would have badly designed monochrome tickets forever.

Is it a better design? Yes. Does it account for everything? of course not. Is the technology there? Not quite — but ideas like these could spark something in someone somewhere.

Everything can be done better. Lets aim for that.

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