The New Card Design for the Barclays Ring.

Question

I’m here to announce that the new card design has been finalized and it will be ready for new cardmembers in late July and existing cardmembers beginning in October. Here’s a quick recap of the very fun and innovative process that we went through together to co-create the next Barclaycard Ring card.
In 2014 we asked cardmembers in an open forum to describe what they liked and didn’t like about the design of their current Barclaycard Ring card. We received hundreds of comments and passed them along to our design team.
This resulted in the following plastic designs
Option 1.pngOption 2.png Option 3.png
Incorporating your feedback, the designers created a three dimensional view of the card designs, which we posted in the forum for more feedback. This round resulted in four unique plastic designs that were presented for an official vote.
Voting results.jpg
The winner, with 42% of the voting Ring cardmembers, was card design #1. We also noticed cardmember feedback regarding concerns about the font choice for the most popular card design. We took this feedback to the design team and they presented four more options to the internal team. We picked one and now it was time to see how these designs looked in reality. About 10 weeks later we got a “proof”, or an example of what the card would actually look like. And I will tell you that it did not look good. Luckily, one of the designers went out to visit the card production vendor. They worked with the design and the production process to get as close as possible to the original design.
And here it is:
C11_card_rRGB_RingMC_EMV.png
We hope you like it! Thanks to everyone who voiced their opinion and helped to shape the new design. And, yes, it is a chip card. (Interested in learning more about the Chip and Signature with PIN enabled technology? Click here for additional details.)
So who will get the new plastic and when?
Starting in October 2015 cardmembers who made at least one purchase in 2014 will automatically receive the new plastic in the mail. Your credit card number and the security code on the back will not change. However, if your expiration date is within a 3 year window, your new card will have a new expiration date. So you will need to remember to update any recurring billers, online merchants or digital wallets with the new date. Your old card will still be valid until sometime in early 2016.
Cardmembers who did not use the card to make a purchase in 2014 or became Barclaycard Ring cardmembers in 2015 will not be automatically re-issued the new card design. If you’d like the new card (with Chip technology), you can call the number on the back of your current Ring card after August 1st and request the new card design. Otherwise, you can wait until your current card expires and you will automatically receive the new card in the mail. We may also choose to automatically re-issue the cards in the future to cardmembers who still have the original orange card.
I hope all of that helps. Of course if you have any questions just leave it in the comments below. Thanks again for participating in the design of the new Barclaycard Ring card!

Answer 1

I'm apart of that community and I was shocked to see that this is all they could come up with. In todays market with the different plastics available this to me is very quaint. Not appealing and to think they had a committee and designers and all that... it's truely disappointing!