It features just two women, and some of the most reviled buildings of recent years. Why must the UK passport look like a clumsy photocopied moodboard?

It has been hailed as the most secure travel document in the world, a fiendishly complex concoction of invisible inks, special fibres and laminated holograms that will foil even the most advanced fraudsters. But with all the focus on security features, the designers of the new UK passport seem to have overlooked the content of what they’re actually designing.

The most obvious blunder in the 36-page “Creative United Kingdom” showcase of artists and inventions (which has already blown back in the predominantly male faces of HM Passport Office) is the inclusion of only two women among the nine champions of creativity – architect Elisabeth Scott and mathematician Ada Lovelace.

“We feel like we have a good representation of icons,” passport office director general Mark Thompson said in defence. “It is not just about celebrating UK creativity, it’s about making the most secure book that I can.” Because of course the craggy faces of creative men are harder to forge than the baby-soft complexions of creative women.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Titanic Belfast museum, another Carbuncle Cup-nominated building, shares a page with the London Eye and Houses of Parliament. Image: Home Office/PA

Then there is the issue of what they’ve actually chosen to depict. Among the “iconic” British landmarks liberally collaged across the pages, the designers have somehow managed to include two of the most reviled structures of recent times – both of which were shortlisted for the Carbuncle Cup for the worst building of the year.

The lunatic tangle of Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit writhes across one page and crashes into the watermark of Shakespeare, who peers out disapprovingly from every spread. It’s a fine example of a very British mess. This privately sponsored Olympic leviathan, built as a totem pole to the richest man in the UK, was recently found to cost the taxpayer £10,000 a week.

Flip a few pages and there, lurking in the corner below the Houses of Parliament as if in the hope you might not spot it, squats the Titanic Belfast museum. This £76m lump graced the Carbuncle Cup shortlist in 2012, the same year as the Orbit, for its clunking metaphor of trying to look like both a ship and an iceberg at the same time. Thankfully a big cut-out of the London Eye swoops across the page to distract your attention.

Other pages are strewn with “iconic British innovations” such as postboxes and stamps, trains and ships, computers and clocks, all cut out and collaged at jaunty angles. It looks like a photocopied moodboard, the result of someone typing “icons of Britishness” into Google, putting them through a pastel line-art filter and scattering them willy nilly across the pages. Which is very likely how they did it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The coolest passport in the world’ … Norway’s passport turns abstract landscapes into glowing northern lights scenes under UV light. Image: Neue Design Studio

There’s the Penny Black and the London tube map, Stephenson’s Rocket and Gilbert Scott’s phone box – and then there’s the token page of multiculturalism, which features a south Asian dancer, a Chinese dragon and a Caribbean carnival costume. By trying to cover all bases in just 16 spreads, it flattens British identity into something resembling a tired school textbook.

Britain makes a new passport every five years, so why not pick just one theme and do it really well, rather than splurging a scattershot collage of the entire history of British culture in one go? Why do passports and banknotes have to be like this – clumsy montages of national symbols in an 18th-century style?

Perhaps it’s because they’re all mostly designed and printed by the same firm, DeLaRue of Basingstoke, purveyor of high-security printed matter since 1821. They do exceedingly fine ridge intaglio printing, exquisite watermarks and multicoloured UV stitching – plus many more secret techniques we’ll never be allowed to know about (that’s why they won the £400m 10-year contract for UK biometric passports) – but they could do with hiring some better graphic designers.

Perhaps Britain could take a lesson from Norway. Having hired an architecture firm to design a new range of abstract glitchy banknotes, the Norwegian authorities unveiled a minimalist passport last year, designed by the Oslo-based Neue Design Studio. It was the result of an open competition to find the best possible product from the country’s talented pool of designers – not an in-house fumble. The result exudes effortless Scandi-cool, with abstract Norwegian landscapes that transform into magical northern lights scenes when exposed to UV light.

Swiss passport … embossed crosses and psychedelic security patterns. Image: Passbüro

The Swiss passport is another model. Beyond its minimal red and white cover, with embossed Swiss crosses dancing across the page, it contains a psychedelic world of geometric security patterns, cut-out portraits and a spread of regional diversity by giving each of the country’s 26 cantons their own page.

Or why not exploit the booklet format and make something to entertain screaming toddlers in the interminable passport queue? That’s what Finland seems to have done – turning their passport into an animated flip-book of a walking elk.

The UK has some of the world’s best graphic minds. They should be put to work designing something Britons can be proud to carry around the globe, not another forgettable piece of design-by-committee.

