Two people liked the ticket. Neither saw why they’d keep it.
Personal project, 2026. Design, research and build, solo.
A concert ticket that lives through the months before a show, and how a two-person test led me to replace its tear with a break.
The story in four pictures
The first version. You tore the stub along the dotted line to get in, and kept it. Shown on the plain rig it was tuned on.
Two people, remote and self-administered. They sat together, and one asked the other for help.
Person 1 | Person 2
Overall feeling, from −4 to +4 | +3 | +3
What did tearing mean to you? | “Not entirely sure what it means” | “It meant I was getting ready to be scanned”
The after-show card felt like a keepsake | Neutral | Disagree
The tear worked. What it meant, and why you’d keep the stub, didn’t land.
The redesign. You press the glass, it breaks from your finger, and you keep the shard. Three presses, three shards, drawn on a plain mirror.
The same for every show
One act at the door. It lets you in and leaves you a keepsake, and the keepsake exists only if you did it.
Different for each artist
The act itself. A tear by default. For this show, a break.
What the test left behind: a shape every ticket shares, and an act that comes from the artist.
Problem
A digital concert ticket is a barcode in an email.
It shows up the week of the show, gets scanned, and disappears. The months of waiting are the part people feel, and nothing is attached to them. Afterward there is nothing to show anyone.
I wanted one card for the whole arc. It should feel more alive as the show nears, never more urgent, become the ticket on the day, and leave something worth keeping.
What I built
The first version was a single card in the browser that changed on a clock.
Weeks out it sat calm, and as the show neared the artwork came alive in stages. States changed at 4am, so you discovered the change instead of watching it.
On the day you tore off the stub to get in, and the stub was your keepsake. If you never tore it, there was no stub.
The judgment moment
Two people tried it, and both liked it.
The tear worked, since both found it and said it felt natural, but what it meant didn’t land. One read it as getting ready to be scanned, and neither saw the point of the card afterward.
The first fix on the table added motion and copy at the tear to say what it meant. I zoomed out instead. If the act at the door is what makes the keepsake, the act should come from the show itself.
Hand-cracked mirrors run through this artist’s work. So the waiting now builds a fracture into the card’s glass, and by show night you know the glass is thin. You press where it feels thinnest, it breaks from your finger, and the shard it cuts loose is yours.
The first version
The final version
Both versions, live. Pull the stub’s corner down or left to tear it. The final version runs on the show’s own art, so step through the weeks with the arrows, and on the day, press the glass.
The tear stays as the default for artists without a world of their own. His own symbols frame the shard but never become it, because handing them to a fan claims the persona instead of witnessing it.
I cut my own additions the same way. I later gave the card a moon to set after the show, then couldn’t recognize it on sight myself, so I removed it.
Proof
The redesign hasn’t met a tester yet, and the first test was weak evidence.
It was remote and self-administered, the two sat together, and one asked the other for help. Two people can’t generalize. They showed me what I couldn’t see alone.
One thing I learned building the break. I wrote the light under your finger to hold back and then bloom, and it arrived flat, because the eye compresses brightness. I check any light ramp for this now.
Before
Seen as a straight line, like a progress bar.
After, a much steeper curve
Seen as a curve that holds back, then rises.
the light I wrotethe light you seeOne second of pressing, left to right, played at a quarter speed.
The light I wrote held back, then bloomed. The eye flattened it to a straight line, so I wrote a much steeper curve to get the bloom back.
Constraints
Nothing on the card counts down or pulses.
It changes by getting richer, never more frequent, because anxiety is the failure mode. Anyone who asks their device to reduce motion gets a still frame, and the changes never carry meaning.
Next
The next round needs to be moderated.
Each person sees one version first, since you only get one first impression, then both side by side, with the win written down before it runs. The keepsake is a claim about months later, so it needs a retest months later. Until the show art’s rights are cleared, this piece can’t ship in this form.