Impressions · An unsolicited proposal for Aesop

How might a receipt remember a visit?

Computational design · Retail experience · Generative print

Most customer data is designed to be stored, analyzed, or acted upon. Can we take data that normally describes a transaction and turn it into material for an emotional artifact? I wondered whether a receipt could remember a visit. So I built a machine that gives every customer a one-of-one print of the moment they were there.

The ideaEvery impression begins with a moment. The inputtime + place + weather + interaction The systeminput → seed → visual grammar → artifact The output1 moment = 1 impression

The concept at a glance

A card printed once for a single visit, pressed and inked like an apothecary label, and yours to keep.

Add photo A quiet archive of visits, each dated, none repeatable. A reason to keep the card, and eventually, a reason to come back.

The gesture

I started thinking about this after buying a refill of Geranium Hand Balm at Aesop. I noticed how much attention went into the last thirty seconds of the purchase: the green tube wrapped with the kind of care that makes a very ordinary thing feel like a small occasion... folded tissue, two samples tucked in, the cloth bag passed across the counter.

The receipt, by comparison, was pretty unremarkable. It recorded the transaction perfectly. It just didn't record anything about the experience.

I wondered if it could. And then I started daydreaming about what that might look like.

Add photo Geranium Hand Balm, just bought.

The idea

A little card, pressed once, and never again.

At the counter, in the second the parcel changes hands, a card is printed for that person and no one else. Its mark is drawn from that exact instant, inked in Aesop's own colors, and pulled a single time. We leave the registration slightly off, the way an honest press always drifts, so it looks like the work of a hand. Each card quietly notes down its own inks, its paper, and the moment it came to be. An edition of one, in the fullest sense. The receipt still does its ordinary job; this travels alongside it, a keepsake of the visit, handed over with the purchase. This one is live, and reading the world around you right now.

This is the real press, running live. It seeds from the sky where you are, the ground you stand on, or a camera, and you can re ink it by hand from the house palette below. Save gives you a print ready file. Every card also carries a code, so you can copy it and draw the very same card again later.

Signal

The sky, live A camera

Place

Mark my coordinates

What it read

Captured

Reading the sky...

Pull impression Save

Or set the ink by hand

Stock

Find an impression

Find Copy this card's code

The live sky needs a connection and the camera needs permission. If either is unavailable, the press falls back to the clock, and the house inks still work by hand.

The range

No two the same.

Each card is drawn from its own moment, so the system never repeats itself. Here are two dozen at once, every one a different second, place, and sky.

Each drawn live in your browser, right now.

Shuffle the wall

The mechanism

How it is made

TIME PLACE WEATHER LIGHT PRODUCT SEED VISUAL GRAMMAR IMPRESSION UNIQUE ID / ARCHIVE MEMORY RETURN Fig. 1 The whole system. Data becomes a seed, the seed becomes an impression, and the impression becomes a reason to return.

The mechanism is plain enough. Each visit becomes a single number, a seed, and that seed decides everything the card turns into. Nothing is chosen from a library, and nothing is drawn twice.

The seed lays down a small grammar of marks, and each one carries a meaning from the moment. The lens is the light, the arc is the sun's path across the day, the ring is the moon at its current fullness, and the fine hatches are the weather. So the card reads as a reading, a small portrait of one moment rather than a decoration.

The two inks print slightly out of register, the way an honest press drifts, which is the whole difference between a thing on a screen and a thing off a press. Color comes from the live conditions, temperature sliding the hue and cloud cover sliding the saturation, so a cold clear morning and a warm grey afternoon are never the same. The full workings are in the notes below.

soft lens · the light confident arc · the day's sun ring · the moon tonight hatch field · the weather counter arc · the horizon scatter · left to chance Fig. 2 The grammar. Each mark given a meaning, placed within gentle bounds. Technical notes

The seed

Every pull begins with a seed, one number mixed from three readings taken the instant you press the button. The millisecond on the clock, a tally that ticks up with each impression, and a timer accurate to the microsecond. Together they give a fresh number for every pull. The seed is deterministic, so handing the same number back draws the very same card, and at retail scale a small registry could check each new seed against the ones already printed to guarantee a true edition of one.

millisecond 14:07:33.482 session pull no. 003 hi-res timer microseconds + + seed three readings, one number, no collisions Fig. 3 The seed. A fresh number every pull; the same number always redraws the same card.

The marks

Six gestures make every card. A soft lens and a confident arc in the second ink, then a ring, a field of fourteen to twenty six hatches ruled slightly by hand, a thinner counter arc, and three to seven scattered dots in the first. The seed sets where each lands, how large it is, and how many there are, always within tuned bounds, so the card stays composed and never sets into a logo.

Registration

Both colors print by multiplying, so wherever they cross they settle into a third, deeper tone. The first ink is nudged up to three pixels off centre, and the second is set four to nine pixels above it and to the right. That small, deliberate misalignment does almost all the work, and it costs us four pixels.

ink B, laid first ink A, over overprint,a third tone drift of 4 to 9 px, up and to the right Fig. 4 Registration. The wobble is on purpose, and we are rather fond of it.

Color and stock

By hand, the house palette offers five pairs drawn from Aesop's own shelf, on Stone, Kraft, or Bone, and picking one re inks the current card without redrawing it. When a live signal drives the color instead, it is computed continuously, temperature mapped to hue and cloud cover to saturation, so every reading lands on its own tone. Either way the card writes its inks, stock, edition, seed, and the moment to the millisecond along its foot, signing and dating itself in the margin.

What it reads

The sky, live. The press asks Open-Meteo for the weather where you are and turns it into ink, temperature setting the hue from cool blue through green to amber, cloud cover setting the saturation from vivid to grey, wind setting how busy the card gets, and damp air thickening the grain.

A camera. The press takes the average color of whatever the lens sees and inks the card in it. Point it at the sky and it goes blue grey, point it at a fern and it goes green, and the exact color is written on the card as a plain hex.

Coordinates. Mark my coordinates asks the browser where you are and prints it along the foot, the way a benchmark is cut into stone. If it will not say, Melbourne stands in, the city where Aesop began.

Where it lives

One little object, three quiet lives.

At the counter

Printed on the spot beside the till, or pressed a little earlier and matched to the visit. A modest machine, built from the same honest materials as the shelves, making no fuss about itself.

On the card

Heavy uncoated stock, a real letterpress bite, the mark in amber. Numbered and dated on the back, the way anything worth keeping tends to be.

In the collection

Come by often enough and you assemble a set without meaning to, each visit dated, and no two the same.

In the hand

What it looks like held.

Held, it is smaller than a postcard and heavier than it looks, on 100gsm cardstock. A single afternoon pressed into a card, the sky that hung over the shop that hour and the moon that night, set in two inks and handed across the counter. Something to keep in a coat pocket, or pin above a desk, long after the balm has run out.

Add photo A card, just handed over. Add photo Tucked beside the sample. Add photo Pinned above a desk, months later.

The opportunity

Making the transaction memorable.

A receipt records what happened at the till. An Impression records that you were there. It turns the data of a visit into something worth keeping, so data becomes material rather than surveillance, and the value of the moment carries past the counter. The value set out below is a hypothesis, not a measurement.

TodayVisit → Purchase → Receipt → Leave

ImpressionsVisit → Purchase → Impression → Keep → Remember → Return

Purchase

The point of sale completes as normal.

Impression

A parallel output, a unique record of the moment, handed over with the bag.

Memory

The customer keeps it, because it is theirs and no one else's.

Collection

Repeat visits accumulate a quiet set, each one dated.

Digital layer

Scan the edition to reach an optional archive, the products you took home, and how to use them.

Return

The brand becomes a small part of the customer's own history.

The card can also hold a second life. Scan the edition and it opens a small archive of the visit. No dashboard, no tracking, just what you took home and how to use it.

Scan the edition

Your Impression

Melbourne · 26 August 2026 · 17:42
Amber over Sage · Edition 0247

The products you took home

Resurrection Aromatique Hand Balm

How to use it

You might also like

Edition 0247, the card it opens.

The edition number already on the card is the only key. When a card is made, a small record is filed under that number, keyed to the card rather than to a person, so the scan is just a lookup, with no login, no email, and no profile. You could type the number on the back, or tap the card if the stock carries a small NFC tag, so there need not be a QR code at all. And because the record lives with the object you chose to keep, throwing the card away breaks the link. That is the real difference between material and surveillance.

Customer · Memory

Gives the visit a physical afterlife
Creates something worth keeping
Makes personalization tangible rather than informational

Brand · Differentiation

Extends Aesop's ritual beyond the store
Turns brand language into a generative system
Creates a collectible physical identity

Business · Re-engagement

A reason to revisit the brand
A post-purchase digital layer
A surface for product discovery

The system is designed to increase memorability, post-purchase engagement, and reasons to return.

The case

Why it belongs to you

Aesop has always been good at making ordinary things feel considered. A hand wash becomes a ritual, a shop becomes somewhere you remember, and a paper bag becomes something you keep for no particular reason.

The Impression asks for very little more than that: that the visit leave you with something worth keeping.

It is made from the visit itself. The colors come from the bottles and the walls. The restraint is simply Aesop's house style. And the care was there from the beginning.

Most importantly, it is actually yours. Nothing is printed twice. The seed is different for every pull, and the information on the card comes from the particular moment you were there. It isn't trying to look personal. It is personal.

Decisions

The thinking, and the second thoughts.

A short record of the decisions that shaped the piece, including a few I had to change my mind about.

The claim I softened

I really wanted each edition to be unrepeatable, but we're not able to fully promise that. It is a 32-bit number: large, but finite. And the visible edition number isn't unique either. So I changed it so that the seed is fresh for every pull and deterministic, and a registry that checks each seed before printing is what would actually guarantee an edition of one. A claim you cannot defend is worse than a smaller one that holds.

Buckets, then a spectrum

At first, the weather snapped into four fixed palettes. They barely changed within a day, which made the cards feel strangely static. Now temperature moves the hue and cloud cover moves the saturation. Fourteen degrees and twenty-two degrees produce genuinely different cards.

The detail that had to earn its keep

Originally I added the moon shape part as decoration, and partly for my love of astrology and astronomy and a desire to normalize moon phases and tracking. It looked nice, but that wasn't enough. So the ring became the moon in fact. It follows the moon's actual illuminated fraction: a full moon closes the circle, while a new moon leaves only a sliver. Now the detail has a reason to be there.

A keepsake beside the receipt

Calling it a new receipt made it sound as though it needed to replace the real one, which was never the point. Or maybe it was? ... Anyway, it is better understood as a keepsake that comes alongside the receipt. Two things come out of the same transaction, but they have different jobs. The receipt records what happened. The Impression remembers it. :-)

The drift, left in

The registration is deliberately a few pixels off. A perfectly aligned print felt too manufactured. That small misalignment is what makes it feel a little more like something pressed by a hand.

Considerations

A few things worth turning over.

Why Aesop?

Aesop already understands that a retail transaction can be a ritual. After buying a refill from their sensitive skincare line, I found myself thinking about the moment after the experience ended. The store had made the purchase feel memorable; the receipt immediately made it ordinary again. I wondered whether the transaction itself could hold on to a little memory of the encounter.

Why does this need to be computational?

I wanted every artifact to be genuinely specific to its moment, rather than choosing from a library of pre-designed cards. Computation lets the object respond to what is happening without making personalization feel like CRM.

Why not just make beautiful postcards?

Because then they would be beautiful but arbitrary. The constraint is what gives the object meaning. This particular card exists because this particular visit happened.

Is this a loyalty programme?

I don't think of it as one. Loyalty programmes tend to quantify the relationship. This tries to make the relationship tangible instead.

Why would someone keep it?

Because it asks nothing of them. It's just a small artifact of something that already happened.

Would this slow down checkout?

It shouldn't. The Impression is designed as a parallel output from the existing transaction, not a new customer journey. The point of sale works as usual; the card is simply produced alongside the purchase.

What happens if the printer breaks?

That's a real operational constraint. A broken machine should never feel like a broken brand. I'd build in a small buffer of pre-generated impressions and, if necessary, quietly fall back to the ordinary receipt.

What is the business case?

I think of it less as a receipt redesign and more as a post-purchase memory layer. Aesop already puts so much care into the experience of being in the store; this gives a little of that experience a physical afterlife. The potential value is in memorability, collectability, repeat visits and post-purchase engagement. Potential, not proven. I haven't measured it.

How does the scan work without being creepy, or a total QR-code nightmare?

The edition number already on the card is the only key. When a card is made, a small record is filed under that number, keyed to the card rather than to a person. So the scan is just a lookup, with no login, no email, and no profile. You could type the number on the back, or tap the card if the stock carries a small NFC tag, so there need not be a QR code at all. And because the record lives with the object you chose to keep, throwing the card away breaks the link. That is the real difference between material and surveillance. The data belongs to the thing in your hand.

Where does AI come in?

AI helped me prototype the system much faster, particularly with writing and debugging the code. The part I find most interesting, though, is computation as a design material, a way to make an object respond to the world around it.

What is it really about?

Underneath the ink and the weather, it's about data becoming material rather than surveillance. The same numbers a shop might normally store and analyze can become something a person actually wants to keep. Computation became most interesting here when it stopped adding more to the world, and started helping one small thing remember.

Impressions

A speculative design concept by Hillary Ramos. Unsolicited, and not affiliated with or endorsed by Aesop.

Role Concept / Creative Direction / Design / Prototyping / Code

Built to explore what computational design can do for print. Live sky data via Open-Meteo. Made in Puerto Rico.