Sea fare

Just saw this picture of the Wellington RFID farecard system at Adam Greenfield’s Flickr stream (CC-by-nc-sa photograph):
Notxtian

It’s called a Snapper card.

Compare this to the London based Oyster card:

And the Hong Kong Octopus card:

This international sea food theme makes me think that we have definitely missed a branding opportunity here (and this for a country of fishermen). Our entire OV-chipkaart system1 has been grossly underdesigned on all fronts, so no surprises there2.

So I’ve got two proposed alternative names for our low countries farecard system:

  • Herring card (Haringkaart)
  • or

  • Mussel card (Mosselkaart)

How do we get this change implemented? And anybody care to mockup a concept?

  1. How stupid is it to put the implementation detail of the ‘chip’ in the name? []
  2. You currently have the messages in the tram: “Don’t forget to check out with your public transport chip card.”These are a bit awkward. []

3 thoughts on “Sea fare”

  1. It may have a cute name but the Octopus system overall is really poorly designed. My card when I was there in January was the style of you showed above but in a random mismash of colors….

    That being said, I love the idea of a Haringkaart! Or maybe Makreelkaart. 😉

  2. My vote goes to haringkaart as well. Sounds great, plus mosselkaart has some x rated connotations 🙂

    And i would also like to suggest the palingkaart, it being almost extinct thus in need of some support and all.

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