So recently I migrated from the UK. This was supposed to be via
British Airways, but this is 2020… so plot-twist:
I was not expecting a Danish mink transmission.
[Orchestral sting]
Nobody expects the Danish Mink Transmission!
Luckily, I had a Plan B: Ryanair.
For those unfamiliar with the Irish airline, Ryanair are Europe’s largest low-budget carrier.
Think Spirit Airlines, if you’re American. The fares are very, very cheap. In fact, flying from
London, the train to the airport usually cost more than base fare for the flight itself. Of course,
you’re then charged piece-meal for every basic amenity on top of that base fare, from
choosing your seat, to basic carry-on baggage, to a drink of water. There even was speculation
and rumour for some years that they would also begin charging for use of inflight toilets,
and possibly fitting more passengers per flight by changing from chairs to “standing saddles”.
Needless to say, it’s not travelling in style. But they get you from A to B.
This video however, is about one of my personal gripes with Ryanair: the thing I need to stare
at through every single flight. On Ryanair, there is no inflight entertainment system,
and usually, not even a seat back pocket. This cuts costs not only for the initial
fitout of the plane, but also on cleaning and turnaround time between flights.
So, without a seatback pocket, where is the mandatory airline safety card? Smack bang in front
of you – right where a you usually find a screen, sits a large safety sticker where it can more
easily be completely ignored. At least by most people. But… I’m not most people. I have spent
way too much time thinking about its awful design, and today I’ll break down exactly why it sucks.
In the fantastic “Understanding Comics”, Scott McCloud defines comics as “juxtaposed
pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce
an aesthetic response in the viewer”. Or to simplify: storytelling through sequential images.
We can think of airline safety cards as comic strips. And as a comic, its biggest flaw – aside
from being atrociously drawn – is inconsistent character design. There’s a reason why visual
media like comics, animation and video games have model sheets: consistency helps the reader
understand what action is taking place. If the character looks different from panel to panel,
what is happening becomes unclear. If your character has pupils in one panel,
and only a line in the next, you have to assume they are squinting or have their eyes shut.
Overall have 4 protagonists: green shirt guy, blue shirt guy, a child and magenta dress lady, who
based on how she runs, looks like she’s suffering a bathroom emergency more than an aviation one.
Our androgenous child, dressed in tiny surgery scrubs, is the most consistent.
In fact, it’s literally unchanged – copied and pasted four times. Lazy, but still preferable
to this twizzler eating, Planet of the Apes cameo, who appears to be the legal guardian.
But worst is our main character, green guy, who suffers from wildly fluctuating swelling
of the hands, unfathomably shaped trousers, and both elongated and dislocated arms.
[Meme music]
If you’re make instructional graphics – you’re going to end up with a few arrows. Arrows need to
be both consistent and intelligible. Right of the bat – consistency gets a big, red fail. This card
contains 50 Arrows, which vary wildly in scale, thickness, implied dimensions and even colour.
As for being intelligible… despite the Microsoft Paint level rendering of human hands,
this illustration clearly conveys the direction, you should pull
to open this sleeve. Left to right. So why then does the arrow look like this?
Here the arrow seems to instruct you to take the yellow mouth piece, and
put it on the back of your head. And for the life of me, I cannot decipher the meaning of these
arrows. Am I mean to pry open the left trouser leg of this infant? What if they’re wearing shorts?
But that pales in comparison to this rat’s nest. I can only presume that at one point,
all the red arrows had yellow strokes to help them read clearly over the halftone grey.
I think it’s likely that over multiple revisions over years, some poor artworker opened this file
and something deep inside them died, and they thought… it’s Ryanair, who really gives a shit?
Of course, the poor design doesn’t end with people and arrows – typography is also inconsistent,
shifting haphazardly between Helvetica and Myriad, because you know – why even bother changing the
default font in Illustrator? This sequence of panels has numbers, none of the others do.
The icons design can be laughably awful. These are meant to be dentures.
This? Who knows? Maybe a relative of this creature? Actually, it’s an
ear with an earring and a woman with a necklace. How can I tell what it is? I can’t. It’s only
comprehensible if you’ve seen the old safety card from way back when Ryanair had seat pockets.
In fact, many of these illustrations are just worse versions of these slightly-less-bad ones.
And while this bad design might be simply frustrating and confusing
in other contexts – let’s not forget that – this is guidance on emergency
procedures – the stakes are significantly higher.
The wonderful podcast, 99% Invisible, recently aired an episode called
“In the unlikely event” exploring the origin and design of airline safety cards.
It’s packed with insightful information, but there are two sobering facts for context here:
First, aviation accident investigators determined that in an average crash,
passengers have 90 seconds to exit the plane for optimal chances of survival.
And, If people sit before going out the exit slide, instead of jumping down as advised,
that added over 40 seconds to evacuation time.
This is Pobeda airlines. Unless you live in Russia, you’ve likely never heard of them. They’re
the budget subsidiary of Aeroflot, with a fleet of only 38 planes. That’s a under a tenth the
size of Ryanair. They too, are an extreme budget carrier, and have gone the route of seat back
safety stickers. Now, Podeba’s design isn’t going to win any beauty pageants – and it first blush,
it looks like a cluttered mess. But that’s mostly down to the sheer volume of bilingual text.
Remove that, and the artwork remains flawed – but it’s vastly more legible than Ryanair’s. Compare
this, with this. Both of these instructions are for the exact same plane. Design is not art.
Design must be useful first, then beautiful. At least Podeba’s is ticking the first box.
According to their own corporate site, Ryanair boasts over 470 Boeing 737-800’s, each with
a capacity of 189. That’s over 100,000 seats backs plastered with this half assed mediocrity.
When taken in view of the printing, installation, maintenance and replacement involved – the cost of
the actual design would be a fraction of a percent of the overall cost of producing these for such
a massive fleet. This design looks like it’s about a day’s work, and it’s piss poor work at that.
Ryanair must have one of the worst safety cards in the industry. Even if you wrong-headedly believe
that good design is a luxury, a nice-to-have, and should be down on the priority list. I
would at least hope you’d agree that when it’s in the service of passenger safety,
it ranks somewhere ahead of paying people to write cringey tweets about the US election,
because that seems like something Ryanair can find the money for.
Ultimately this safety card is bad for many reasons
– it’s bad for Ryanair’s brand perception. This what people stare at for the entire duration of
their flight – no amount of sassy tweeting will offset that experience. It’s poorly conceived,
badly executed and confusing to understand – all of which ultimately harm passenger safety.
And lastly, it’s a sign of poor judgement – if they’re cutting corners on the art for the
safety card, where else are they cutting corners where they really shouldn’t be?
Look, I’m thankful for Ryanair for being there when my other plans fell
through – but there’s a reason they were Plan B. Budget doesn’t need to mean poorly designed.
If you’re interested to understand what good safety card design is like,
I highly recommend checking out the episode of 99% invisible which I mentioned,
liked in the description. Also, Delta Airlines have made their in-flight safety video entirely
animated in the style of safety card infographics – it’s actually fantastic work, and worth a watch.
If you enjoyed this video, feel free to like or leave a comment below to help this channel
to grow and reach more people. If you want to see more videos about design and typography
consider subscribing. My name’s Linus, thank you for watching and I’ll see you in a future video.