Exhibition ticket

Ashgrove Festival Trust 2023

The whole brief was the four seconds. A steward at a gate at dusk cannot be asked to look for microtext, and cannot be given a loupe. Everything on this ticket is checkable at arm’s length or by a lamp on a lanyard.

The primary feature is a latent image sited where a thumb naturally falls, so the tilt that reveals it is a movement the steward is already making. Fibres in the board give the second check under the ultraviolet lamps at the gate. The split-duct band across the face is a third, and doubles as the day code — a different colour pair for each of the three days.

Volume

At ninety-six thousand the economics change: the ticket board is a stock line rather than a bespoke make, and the intaglio pass was dropped in favour of the features above, which is the right trade when a document lives for one evening.