Design and deceit

Before I was old enough to drive, it was necessary to buy a weekly bus pass to get around and about the hilly scattering of villages that was my stomping ground in the north of England. This pass was called a MegaRider, and if I remember correctly it cost around £9. These were purchased directly from bus drivers, who would print out the MegaRider ticket much like any standard bus ticket, before placing it on a cardboard backing and peeling over a clear plastic film that adhered the flimsy receipt in place, rendering the MegaRider indestructible.

Around the age of fourteen, some friends and I began tinkering with graphics software, acquiring (through entirely legitimate means, I assure you) copies of Macromedia Flash and Fireworks, Cinema 4D and the like. With the abundant curiosity and disposable hours of youth, we taught ourselves the basics of image manipulation with the support of online tutorials. For us, this was a period of neon, grunge textures, pixel art, and distressed typography—a heady blend of skatecore and the aesthetic hangover of Y2K and the Matrix. Though a way to experiment and express ourselves creatively—design, this was not.

Ever on the lookout for ways to scrape together a little pocket money, it occurred to me that I might be able to save £9 a week by forging my MegaRider. We had a printer, and I’d convinced my parents that I needed a laminator for ‘art projects’. It couldn’t hurt to try.

I scanned a MegaRider and imported it into Fireworks. I then meticulously sliced it up and created imitative layers. First, both sides of the cardboard backing. Then the receipt itself. I scoured the web for a free font that resembled enough the blocky monospace of the ticket printer, and line-by-line tweaked font size, tracking, and leading values to map pixel-to-pixel to the original.

Next, the meticulous recreation of watermarks and the imitation of the distressed textures of cheap ink on cheap thermal paper with masks and noise. The patient choreography of varying alpha levels and blend modes across the layered elements. Printing, tweaking, printing, tweaking. Learning to guillotine the receipt paper leaving a few millimetres at the corner that could be torn off to simulate the tear of the receipt from the bus printer. Then the mounting to the false backing, lamination, and finally, a good 10 minutes of scrunching, folding, and roughing up to establish realistic levels of patina.

Guerilla testing

For the forged MegaRider’s debut trial, I was understandably anxious. Despite my satisfaction with the fabrication, the real test would be the bus drivers who judged them every day. I’d prepared a coterie of excuses for if I was caught: “I found it on the floor”, “A stranger gave it to me”. Failing that—run! I wedged the pass into my wallet, casually flipped it open whilst strolling on board, and sauntered cooly to my seat. But no excuses were needed; bus drivers barely glanced at tickets anyway.

Within weeks I’d made bank. It was time to expand my operation. Artboards were duplicated and dates, times, and route numbers were updated and varied. No two MegaRiders were the same—the tears on the receipt corners, the angles when placed on the backing, and the creases and distortions. Once the templates were created, a deck of passes could be whipped up in an hour. This became my Sunday evening ritual. Come Monday, they were exchanged for £5 notes under desks, in corridors, and on the busses themselves. My classmates saved £4 a week and I pocketed the difference.

The scam ran for a month or two before I shut up shop. The gig had run its course. More and more people caught wind of the operation and tracked me down for their own dodgy passes. I grew fearful that not a bus driver, but a teacher or parent, would suss me out, and I had no wish to become the victim of my own success.

And indeed I considered the scam a success. I justified my actions by the fact that I, a teenager with finite resources and no formal training, had taught myself the skills to bluff the bus drivers. Like a white-hat hacker, I had discovered a system vulnerability. The difference was that I’d then gone on to exploit it. In a world imposed upon teenagers by adults, it’s natural to try to wrench, bend, and break the constraints of ‘the system’.

In a world imposed upon teenagers by adults, it’s natural to try to wrench, bend, and break the constraints of ‘the system’.

We do this through how we dress, the memes we share, the music we listen to, and the language play that renders our coded messages incomprehensible to older generations. These are all creative acts as practices that define boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Like fellow students who bootlegged CDs or acquired booze and cigarettes through older siblings, dealing in forged bus passes leant me a sense of ‘cred’.

Fake it till you make it

The MegaRider was one of the most fun projects I’ve worked on in the twenty-or-so years since. It had a clear end goal and measurable success criteria. The brief was simple—don’t get caught. Being a minor, the risks were not as severe as I told myself at the time, but the thrill drove me to pursue (within the limits of my abilities) a flawless impersonation of the real, original artefact.

But if a forgery is by this logic not real, what about the authentic MegaRider? These are copies of an original design, each one fabricated much like my fake MegaRiders, albeit by a different process. If my homemade passes are then a copy of a copy, how are they valued in relation to the original copy? The exchange value of the ticket and the right to passage it grants are symbolically intertwined, like paper currency, in the ticket itself being minted by the act of the driver printing it out using the bus company’s select hardware and software.

If we consider the bus ticket as a piece of communication design, what is denoted by the choppy, smeared lettering is secondary to what is connoted by the ticket itself. Unlike, say, a gig poster, in which the majority of the information is presumably of value to the viewer—who is playing, where, when, how to buy tickets, and so on, all the bus driver needs to know at a glance is whether or not the ticket is valid. This is communicated not just by the data printed on the greasy thermal paper but by the perceived authenticity of the ticket itself, and perhaps also by the perceived honesty of the person in possession of the ticket. Did I, a well-mannered fourteen-year-old (naturally), look capable of dealing in counterfeit goods?

I digress.

The fiction that anticipates the fact

Is it surprising that one of my first forays into the graphic arts was to commit fraud—after all, isn’t there something of the forger in the designer? How much is designed in service to constructed realities? As Michael Bierut puts it, “Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact”. To fabricate can mean ‘to create’ or ‘to deceive’. Design is a process of envisioning a non- or not-yet-reality, borrowing from the past, and digital design in particular plagiarises the real world, forging the physical in virtual space. We call it skeuomorphism, signification, and metaphor.

To design is to prototype. Whether it be ceramics, mobile apps, defibrillators, or Formula One cars, there are no solutions, only interventions, and as designers (and creators more generally) each project we undertake is a step towards bridging the gap between reality and fantasy. A gap that can never be fully closed.

With each iteration, we learn what does and doesn’t work. In his essay ‘The Elements of Good Craft’, Christopher Butler talks about the importance of repetition—that the only way to make good things is to make many things: “You learn to make good things by learning how to see which of the things you’ve made are good”.

My forgeries were eventually good enough.

Without realising it at the time, I’d set myself my first-ever design brief and successfully delivered the project to a happy client. In his essay ‘Authenticity: A User’s Guide’, Michael Bierut tells the story of graphic designer Marian Bantjes who, when reflecting upon a parking permit she once forged for a friend, admitted that it was “one of the most satisfying design tasks [she had] ever undertaken”. There may be a fine line between imitation and falsification, but it seems necessary for all designers, particularly those young in their careers, to cross it. In this way, we learn to love and respect that line.

Nowadays the MegaRider and similar multi-day tickets are bought and managed in the bus company’s official app. This keeps things nice and tidy, and presumably more difficult to forge. Though I’m sure that somewhere a budding teenage designer is tinkering around, using Chat-GPT to generate the code to replicate the app ticket screen, and I wish them the best of luck.