Design for Impact: Fifty Years of Airline Safety Cards (Paperback)

~ (Author), Johan Pihl (Author), Carl Reese (Preface) "Pre-war safety card from Imperial Airways..." (more)
Key Phrases: las mascarillas, votre ceinture, safety cards, Pan Am, New York, Air France (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

You know you’re supposed to review it, although few of us do, and it is there for your own protection in the "unlikely event," in every seatback on every airliner from every country throughout the world: the laminated safety card. Yes, these colorful works of universal illustration all answer the same basic questions – Where’s that life vest? How does the oxygen mask work? Where’s the closest exit? – but every plane and every airline has its own unique system of graphic shorthand to communicate quickly and across language barriers. Design for Impact is a compendium of the most interesting and imaginative of these airline safety cards, from the earliest booklets created for planes like the 1930s Pan-Am Flying Clipper to the simple pictograms used on today’s jumbo jets. This wryly humorous primer ("Gentlemen should loosen their ties before impact" counsels a 1960s British Air card) on the most basic – and urgent – form of visual communication inlcudes cards from planes like the De Havilland Comet, the Lockheed Constellation, the DC-3, the Boeing 727, and the Concorde, along with airlines such as BOAC, Eastern, Air France, Ghana Air, Lufthansa, PAN AM, Qantas, Swiss Air, and Sudan Airlines, among many others, all reproduced at their original size. Design for Impact will appeal to both aviation buffs and information designers.

About the Author

Carl Reese , "King of the Safety Card," has a collection of more than 70,000 airline safety cards. Eric Ericson and Johan Pihl are Stockholm-based graphic designers and members of the firm Der Kern.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press; 1 edition (February 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568983875
• ISBN-13: 978-1568983875
• Product Dimensions: 11.9 x 9.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #666,421 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Unfortunately merely a showcase for his collection, April 23, 2003

By	Randal "digitas" (Hoboken, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

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.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, December 17, 2005

By	R. Meyer (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.