Customer Reviews

Design for Impact: Fifty Years of Airline Safety Cards

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As someone very interested in information design and especially airline safety card design, I was hoping this book would have good samples of what the editorial review termed "the most interesting and imaginative of these safety cards."

Unfortunately, instead the entire book is apparently merely an only vaguely interesting set of reproductions of cards from Carl's collection -- chosen apparently on the basis of scarcity rather than interest. Thus we get two full pages of reproduction of a card from Air Ceylon which has nothing of interest to recommend it (unless you are really interested in Ceylonese typography).

The text (what little there is) unfortunately adds nothing to our understanding, as it is almost entirely about the history of the introduction of new airliners and has almost no interface with the actual (and very interesting) history of the development of the modern safety card, or the more general topic of safety and instructional graphics.

The most interesting aspect of this book for me was the few reproductions of pre-war cards, and comparing styles of commercial illustration -- but you can view better comparisons in almost any average book on the history of poster design.

In summary, get this book only if you want some nice reproductions of pretty average to poor safety cards from some small countries and short-lived airlines. I can spend at least 30 minutes each airline flight examining different aspects of the safety card, but this book didn't even hold my attention for an hour.

This is an excellent survey of the history and design of safety cards. I thought that the cards selected were an excellent choice and it would have been impossible for it to be comprehensive. Overall, an excellent book.