“Everyone is trying to make their (prepaid phone) card stand out,” Carson (Harvey Carson of Pentagon Graphics, not to be mistaken with Pentagram) says - and if that involves a design that some might consider rather didactic, or even ugly, well, so be it.

From an article by Rob Walker, who wrote about about the design of prepaid phone cards in his article, “Dial Tone: Loud, blunt and graphic: How form functions in a very competitive market” in the New York Times Magazine.

Iridesco has had the opportunity to design a prepaid - not phone, but ringtone - card. About three years ago, my cousin’s friends from business school is starting a ringtone business called ‘mtogo‘ (m-to-go), and needed some design work. I didn’t know this at the time (and still don’t quite understand), but the ringtone business is a very profitable one. So we designed and presented a few ideas:

These are the initial sketches. The two on the left: I was trying to go for an abstract illustration style for the different sexes (I don’t remember if I had a reason for splitting it up though). I thought an illustration-style card would give you an interesting card when you tear off the top half. I had a couple of other sketches that play more with this top-bottom idea, and also a concept where they come out with a set of 4 cards, and how the cards can be put together and make a big picture. They didn’t like any of the concepts. They went with Danny’s design on the right, which I refer to as the “night club design”. I think this is around the time that the iPod ads just came out (and I still don’t like them one bit), and mtogo really liked the silouette look.

For the second round, I was still trying to go for a more abstract look, something a bit more moody. Actually, now looking at these designs, I don’t know what I was thinking. mtogo ended up using a modified version of the nightclub design on the right.

We also designed some posters for them to promote the cards:

They loved both designs, and ended up going with the one on the right. My thoughts looking at them now: the one on the left pops more, and it’s more in line with the actual card’s design; the right one looks nice and reminds me a bit of the old Russian posters; I don’t like silouettes.

The biggest difference between art and design is that design has a purpose. In our case here, the purpose is to help our client sell cards. I can tell you easily which design I prefer and which direction I would’ve gone down - but none of us can tell which design would sell best (or maybe the design doesn’t matter at all). The client, at the end, chose what they thought their customers would respond to most. And that’s that. For us, it was an interesting project and it sure is fun to look back at the designs now.