The new British Passport was unveiled yesterday with a host of new security features, and yet it is the aesthetic redesign that has attracted the most attention, with design critics seemingly unable to decide on whether it is a timeless summary of British life or just a cliched collection of chocolate box images.
Personally I believe the passport occupies a half-way house stage between a true modernisation and a re-hash of the old style. I love the stylised bird silhouettes and the graphic waves that surround the identification picture, but that first page is truly awful. The combination of drop caps and centre justified text makes the copy seem lop-sided and the selection of images seem disjointed and clumsy.
Overall I'd say it is a decent attempt at sneaking some progressive work into an official document, but it would have been a refreshing change for the home office to take a gamble on something more reflective of modern life than seagulls and geographical features.
Mate completely agree about the first page it is a shocker, the use of such a stereotypical, cliched image seems like a joke! Surely only the most simple and basic of images, if any, should be used on such an important (and serious) document. It looks like a page from an amateur poetry anthology.
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