For the tickets in my McLaren rebranding, I wanted to introduce more colour and graphics to the F1 tickets, they are the first thing a person sees before they go to the event so making a great first impression is essential.

My initial idea was to use different concepts depending on race I would be designing special edition tickets for a small number of races in the season. This included races like Monaco where I would do vintage-style tickets because of the numerous years it has been on the F1 calendar and Silverstone as it was the first F1 race to exist.

I began by making a mood board full of different ideas and other tickets that graphic designers have made for inspiration and to refer back to. I also included current F1 tickets for things I will need to put in my tickets such as the date and areas people are allowed.

I decided to design my tickets in Illustrator in case I wanted o use the pen tool I did end up using so this was a good decision for me. I began by drawing the helmets for my tickets as I knew they were something I wanted to include I decided to make my tickets access all areas for the McLaren garage, these were going to be VIP tickets. I did these in separate files in illustrator and when finished drawing them saved them as PNGs ad brought them back into my ticket file. I then split my ticket to a place where I could have a barcode strip for each day which I took inspiration from my mood board. In these I included the date, what was happening on that date and the barcode that could be scanned, I did this for the 4 different days. Instead of keeping the background for this white, I decided to add striped coming from the bottom left corner to which I used the colours from the helmet at a lower opacity to fill these. This then gave me inspiration on how to fill the rest of my ticket, using the pen tool I made blobs around the ticket which I could then fill with different shades of orange and some light blue at a low opacity so the text could still be seen. I did different shades of orange to match the McLaren theme and h blue to match when I featured it in my other touchpoints. For the name, access and ticket reference, I used a san serif font to make it differ and stand out from the rest because it is the most important part of the ticket, I used hierarchy to differ what would be in the larger font and what would be smaller, I made ADULT largest as it deciphers what kind of ticket it is and then accesses all areas so it can be easily seen when walking around the paddock. I put a white box behind this so it could be easily seen above the colour in the background of my ticket and put the text in black to contrast with this so I would stand out and be more readable from a distance. I then added the F1 logo and race in the corner using the original style that is normally seen in F1 tickets so mine would look more realistic and didn’t believe needed remaking as it already worked like this. I also added my McLaren logo into the white box to show that his ticket was directed only at McLaren’s personal and VIP fans. Finally, I added in the legal stuff below my white box just like I had seen n all the other F1 tickets, it again made them look more realistic and professional.

I love how my tickets came out, in the beginning, I was struggling with what I was going to do with them and how to design them, but in the end, my mood board helped me and with plenty of experimentation they came out exactly how I wanted them to.

Something I would change in the future is also to make my tickets able to go in lanyards or make lanyard versions of these which people are seen to be wearing on the paddock all the time to get in.