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by Mark Tungate (@MarkTungate) If you can’t find a safety card in the seat pocket in front of you, it may be because a collector has already snapped it up. Inspired by the Paris Metro’s mock airline safety card campaign, we examine an aviation subculture.

A recent campaign for RATP — the Paris Metro operator, in other words — mimicked the design tropes of aircraft safety cards. The campaign was amusing in its own right but it got us thinking about safety cards in general.

You may not be surprised to learn that there’s a whole subculture devoted to this subject. Many people collect cards and there are several sites devoted to them, such as airlinesafetycards.be and allsafetycards.com. Pinterest, predictably, is also a rich source of safety card fun.

For enthusiasts, there is a classic book called “Design For Impact: Fifty Years of Airline Safety Cards”, by Eric Ericson and Carl Reese. They point out that safety cards “display a wide variety of aesthetic approaches, ranging from late-1950s optimism to contemporary graphic minimalism”. Indeed, as with most forms of communication, the cards “reflect the culture in which they were produced”.

A 2015 edition of Apex Experience (the magazine of the Airline Passenger Experience Association, through which leading airlines work together to make flights more enjoyable) provided a useful potted history of safety cards. Apparently, the earliest appeared in the 1930s and contained only text. Illustrations emerged in the 1940s.

So why didn’t photographs eventually take the place of diagrams? Although there are rare examples (see left), a 1967 study found that diagrams were preferable as they “require less study to distinguish important from insignificant details”. Colour is a sticking point: although it’s become standard, another study — this time from 1997 — found that readers couldn’t decide whether it was purely decorative or being used to enhance certain instructions.

https://youtu.be/gzsH67F4Dt4

While airline safety films have recently been co-opted to express carriers’ brand values, safety cards remain relatively simple. But that does not prevent them from being interesting — and sometimes downright quirky.

 

Mark TungateMark Tungate (@MarkTungate) is the editorial director of the Epica Awards (@EpicaAwards), the only global creative prize judged by the specialist press. In this series of articles called Design Plus, Epica highlights creativity in the design field.

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