Spend More Money on Good Design

I’ve dated around when it comes to bank accounts. I never could find the one bank that was good enough to settle down with. In this process I realized one recurring theme—they all had bad debit card design.

In theory, I would assume banks would put a lot of money, time and effort into the design of their cards. Why? A better designed card could potentially tempt the holder to pick it out of the cards in their wallet more often than the other cards—even subliminally.

a few debit card samples

So why is there this lack of a well designed debit card? I believe it’s simply a flaw in the system and no one has picked up on it yet. Banks work with debit card suppliers and the design process pretty much ends there; pick a color, perhaps a boring photo or two, some wavy lines, glitter, slap the logo on it and that’s that. Some banks even let you “design your own debit card” because they are too lazy and cheap to put the effort in to creating a good one, or perhaps they just don’t know any better.

After all, what you don’t know can’t hurt you right?