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This is such a great, smart, and fun design solution in response to the recent news that the front of NYC’s MetroCard will be offered as advertising space. Wayne Congar and Brendan Bilko of the creative and brand consultancy firm Mayday Mayday Mayday on New York’s Lower East Side, propose embracing the inevitable by making it into a design-y game. MetroCard as enigma. MetroCard as puzzle piece. Much in the way that a Chuck Close portrait is made up of hundreds of individual abstract shapes and sizes, why not take a billboard or an ad and blow up small sections of it rather than trying to fit an entire ad on the small space, creating an appealing abstract pattern on the MetroCard that will have New Yorkers looking at their neighbors’ cards trying to piece together the whole. Reminds me a little of the popular guerilla marketing stunts that have been adorning the city streets in the past decade. Piquing people’s curiosity and instead of ignoring the ad, creating more of a buzz. Mayday offers four possible ad scenarios on their site, though they admit to not knowing if printing of individual cards will be possible. The way I see it, even if this concept doesn’t work as a puzzle piece, having a uniformly appealing abstract image on all the cards that can get people guessing and interacting is win-win for everyone: we the MTA passengers get an aesthetically pleasing object (always a plus in my book) and the advertisers get people talking about what they’re selling.

via fastco