I would be happy to use this thread for people to offer feedback to me
OK, I'll bite. I looked at a handful of these new tickets today alongside some in the old format from the same machine. Here are my personal opinions based on what I've seen so far.
I think there are three aspects to this.
1) The information printed on the ticket and the choice of words and phrases used.
2) The printing quality.
3) The layout.
In the first category, the tickets are considerably clearer to the passenger. Fewer abbreviations. Better explanations. Informing travellers whether or not their ticket can be refunded or exchanged. Reducing the scope for passengers to misinterpret something on the ticket, deliberately or otherwise. There's still room for improvement. The requirement to carry/show railcards should be made explicit: Make it unarguable that the ticket is invalid otherwise. Terminology should not differ between the tickets and the ticket machines - for example the ticket says "Under 16 year old" but the machine still says "Child". I note that the "Concession Single" is not yet being printed in the new format, and as others have already mentioned, the machine needs to be a lot clearer about what qualifies as a "concession". Why can't the day of the week also appear now on the ticket next to the date of travel? (How often do people know today is "Friday" but forget whether it's the 20th or 21st?)
The printing quality is unsatisfactory. A ticket printed in advance has the date of travel printed in inverse. From the same machine, in the old format the date is just about readable, but on the new version it is illegible: the black has come out too solid in places. If this were to move beyond a small-scale trial, more work would be needed to tune the tickets to match more closely the capability of the printers in these machines. The green 'National Rail' text in the background is too strong and makes the tiny black printed text hard to read. (Again, on the old tickets, this is less of a problem because of a better choice of font for the text in an equivalent position.)
The layout is a mess and, in my view, still not fit for purpose. The existing layout wins hands down. The gains in clarity for the passenger have come at too great a price for staff, whose brains can glance at an existing ticket and rapidly process the patterns on it, home in on the areas of interest, and judge instinctively whether or not it needs closer examination. Either it will take longer to check each new ticket or that check will simply be less effective. Unlike the mocked up examples at the start of the thread, there is no space between some lines of text: the text is so squashed up vertically that it makes it slow to read it. "Valid for one journey from" has been pushed upwards and overlaps the orange band. The solid black symbols on the top right are a nice idea but badly implemented. The circle looks like a hole in the ticket and is smaller than in the mock-up. It is far too similar to the diamond - you have to look closely to see which it is. The symbols need to be more obviously distinct from each other and each symbol should appear in a fixed position on every ticket - they should not move left or right depending on what other ticket text there is. I think more symbols should be used. Much more attention should be paid to the choice of fonts, sizes and spacing used in different parts of the ticket.