For this project, I was asked to design a note to be included with some custom monogrammed leather passport covers that were being sent out to prospective clients in the Travel industry.
I knew instantly that I wanted the note to look like a passport, so it could be placed inside the leather cover. I could have just taken an image of the cover of a US or French passport (Contentsquare is a French company) and used that as the note, but I saw an opportunity. I wasn’t given many chances to create custom graphics for projects, often having to use preexisting designs from other designers or taking graphics off of Adobe Stock, so I took the initiative and decided to design a custom cover crest as if Contentsquare was a country with it’s own passport.
Clever little concept integrations like this are my jam, so I got to work. I began researching passports, and found this neat website that had a picture of every passport from around the world. This was a huge help in getting a feel for what kind of styles and elements I could use for my own passport.
After awhile I settled on making a more traditional crest-style cover, which led to looking at heraldic designs. Heraldic crests incorporate a lot of iconography, and usually have some sort of shield shape in the center, flanked by a large animal. Contentsquare uses small icons to help illustrate their core values, so I thought it would be perfect to include those. The icon for Uniqueness is a unicorn, which worked perfect as a replacement for heraldic lions and horses. Once I had the basic components figured out, it was just a matter of putting them together, and designing them to match both heraldic design and Contentsquare’s general style.