Three wolves™

Internal Affairs have just released our new passport design.

I know I know, it’s just a passport right? Not that important in the grand scheme of things right? Well, maybe but this is a national symbol. It’s a huge part of our identity when we’re overseas. It’s your lifeline and your world when you are away from our fair shores. And it’s what all the other people in the customs line stare at!

You know what I mean… You’re standing there and you see a flash of red on someone’s passport and you wonder where they come from. Then a green one - ooh, is that an Irish one? If you are lucky enough to be standing near a Swiss national, you can admire their absolutely classy bright red embossed version and then feel slightly cheated as you look down at your new Kiwi one and decide that it really really sucks compared to theirs. Damn those Swiss and their respect for good design!

What a lost opportunity to do something totally kick-ass. The only thing that they got right is the black cover. The foiled printing on the front and back covers is just shonky and the attention to detail in the design and in the printing execution are just laughable.

My colleague put it quite well I think: “You do wonder how many people were on the committee that designed this one.” He’s right: it really reeks of a design-by-committee job. I feel for the designer(s) here as I bet they had a bunch of great concepts but as the project wore on they got more and more disillusioned and finally just caved in and let the client have it their way. Crying shame. Given the high quality of work that usually comes from the guys at Clems that designed this, it really makes you wonder whether any other company would have fared better given the same project.

So what would I do differently? It has to be said i’m not aware of any of the constraints of the original brief, so I have no idea about what can and can’t be printed or done, but let’s assume that anything within reason is possible…

I’d loose the half baked fern and unnecessarily massive crown logo (this could go on the back, and small cause it’s ugly).

I’d choose a better typeface. Something with some flavor and character… maybe National from the Klim type foundry (which was designed by a Kiwi as well which equals more brownie points).

I’d question why the Maori translation of “NEW ZEALAND PASSPORT” is reversed in size and flipped so it reads “PASSPORT NEW ZEALAND”? If there’s no good reason for this, i’d reverse it back and maybe even have the whole sentence on one line rather than splitting it as they’ve done.

I love the positioning (right alignment) of the swiss version and the negative space that it creates, so I’d look at this approach rather than the strangely off-centered option that they’ve gone with. Might not work though so you would have to play around a bit.

You could do some great things with embossing - maybe a nice repeating stylised kiwi pattern behind the type and for a mark of some description (sticking with well known NZ icons) you could go with the southern cross as a silver foil below the type.

Hmm, maybe I should mock this up! In any case, it’s been said that this would have been a great piece of design work for Internal Affairs to put out for competition and see what the best of the best of New Zealand design agencies could come up with. Guess we’ll never know what could have been.

The new NZ passport

As a contrast, the lovely and well designed Swiss passport: