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Comment by honkhonkpants | Hacker News Reader

Let's comment on the visual design of passports. These are all basically the same, except two that stand out: Switzerland, and The Vatican. The latter is very typically Swiss, with an attractive, simple, and modern design. The former is sinister and mysterious, but also quite distinctive.

Honorable mention to Brazil and Bosnia for having passports without a coat of arms type of thing on the front.

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The Swiss benefit from having a flag with a moniker that is simple and instantly recognizable and fits very well in something similar to today's minimalist designs. The others who use coat-of-arms-like designs can't.

To be fair, I had to search for the Vatican and Switzerland, so they didn't stand out to me. The most noticeable was Brazil's with a "design" (at least a line) that fills the whole cover. It might have hurt though that the Vatican's and Switzerland's passports were on the far left side on my monitor size while Brazil's was near the center.

As far as I know the cross is technically the coat of arms, which probably has to do with the whole confederation thing. Passports do usually have quite different backgrounds inside, but generally you of course want them to be as recognizable as possible.

One other cute side note. It looks like all passports seem to span the colors of the rainbow!...save yellow. Gold seems to be the standard color of the type/designs, so I suppose yellow or orange[0] as backgrounds are out.

Most have dignified, darker tones. Singapore and Switzerland have the brightest backgrounds of brilliant red while a few have pale but not over-saturated greens (Niger, Guinea, Saudi Arabia). Actually Fiji has quite a cyan passport too.

[0] The red Singapore passport comes close to orange, although that might just be the way they scanned it.

For what it's worth, I know that the British emergency passport is pretty close to yellow - It seems to look more beige on the internet than I remember it though.

I had one a couple of years ago and it was a warm-cream colour. Biggest rip off ever though - don't lose you passport while abroad!

I was always a fan of the the New Zealand passport. I think the edge design is rather distinctive/attractive.

> Honorable mention to Brazil and Bosnia for having passports without a coat of arms type of thing on the front.

I'm not sure what Bosnian passport you saw, but my friend's definitely has a coat of arms (shield) on it.

There are a couple other interesting variations from the default. Having a border (Republic of Congo, using a map rather than a coat of arms (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras), and additional imagery that runs over the edge (Brazil, New Zealand, Portugal, and Sweden).

Check out the Maldives with the embossed dolphins on the front!

Personally, I love the coat of arms, it's such an anachronistic thing that's actually still a thing!

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