Dial Tone

In Consumed: Prepaid phone cards: How blunt graphics and cluttered design send signals to phone-card consumers

“The main business of manufacture is to make objects that people want to buy,” Russell Lynes wrote in “The Tastemakers,” his 1954 book. “It is not to improve public taste.” Thus he was dismissive of the way the term “good design” was being used by everyone from the Museum of Modern Art to Sears, Roebuck & Company. These days, of course, you can’t fling a Michael Graves spatula without hitting a panel discussion about the public “good” that radiates from adding what Lynes snidely called “taste appeal” to workaday objects. But not all objects.

Prepaid phone cards — which sell long-distance minutes in advance for use on any phone — fall into one of those consumer categories in which the tastefulness of a design isn’t much of an issue. To shop for one entails confronting a barrage of blunt, screaming graphic treatments, each jostling for the viewer’s eye at the newsstand or convenience store. This echoes the unwieldy nature of the phone-card business: card selections vary significantly not just by region but also by neighborhood, and new cards are released practically every day. It’s a ”highly, highly competitive market,” says Jeffrey Kapner, vice president for marketing for the long-distance carrier Total Call International.

A prepaid-card buyer might be a person with no long-distance service or one who finds that prepaid rates to a particular country are a better deal than the packages long-distance carriers offer to residential consumers. Many are immigrants looking for the best deal to call home, so a top mission of the prepaid-card design is to announce in no uncertain terms what country or countries it is meant for. For example, Kapner points to a T.C.I. card meant for Filipinos in the U.S. Its background is a lush, tropical beach scene; a triangle, filled with images of cash, points into a cartoon piggy bank, skipping any subtlety in pitching the card’s value. The bright yellow title is ”Tipid Pinoy” — tipid means ”thrifty” and Pinoy is an informal word for ”Filipino.” Similarly, a card called Vietnam Connect shows post-card-like images from that country; one called ”Mi Paisita” shows a map of Central America with countries coded by flag design.

Five years ago, flags were a dominant form of card-design signaling, says Harvey Caron of Pentagon Graphics, a major printer of prepaid cards. But since then, there has been a move toward cultural images: Jamaica cards might have images of cricket or soccer, a card for calling Israel might show the Wailing Wall and so on. ”Everyone is trying to make their card stand out,” Caron says — and if that involves a design that some might consider rather didactic, or even ugly, well, so be it.

While simply adding a stainless-steel finish to a commodity like a refrigerator can attract ”good design” fans, the serious prepaid-phone-card user is rarely bamboozled by taste appeal. These consumers negotiate a minefield of charge structures, confusing activation fees and minute-expiration rules, says Laurette Veres, editorial director of Intele-CardNews, a trade publication. ”When a good card is on the marketplace, people find out very quickly — ‘It’s that yellow one with the blue flag’ — and word of mouth travels fast,” she says. It may travel even faster, she adds, when a card turns out to be a rip-off. Or when it works well for a country that it isn’t advertising. Street-level distributors routinely check how a card performs in calls to a variety of markets, looking for hidden bargains, Kapner says, ”almost like bond traders looking for the arbitrage opportunity.”

Years ago, when prepaid cards were relatively rare, some featured ”beautiful artwork,” Veres says, but aggressive designs have long since taken over. Still, at least some card makers have experimented with looks that, if not exactly beautiful, are pretty creative. When Wendy Dembo, a strategic-marketing and trend consultant based in New York, started buying prepaid cards to call a client in Brazil, she was baffled by the ”chaos” of choices blending in at the newsstand with magazines, lotto tickets, candy and tiny-type charts showing country rates. But since finding one that she likes, she has lately noticed cards with elaborate die-cut shapes: a pair of boxing shorts, an avocado, a woman’s backside in short shorts and so on. She was tempted to tell design-savvy friends — although it turned out that few of them had been paying enough attention to prepaid cards to appreciate the development — but not to stop using the card she knows works best for her. ”The design is just hideous,” she says, ”like somebody has gone crazy with Photoshop.” Even so, she knows it when she sees it.