Norway’s new passport – already a design classic? (opens in new tab)

Notes really should have faces on them. It's easier for the human brain to detect when something isn't quite right with them and also to be able to see differences between one note and the other. This helps to detect forgeries.

I learnt this from the Bank of England museum.

Outside of the US the green dollar bill is one of the most known incarnations of her, changing it would be sad, to say the least. It'd be like painting the Statue of Liberty pink.

You omitted the best proposal. Link to wayback machine since the images does'nt seem to resolve on original site anymore.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150518212006/http://buzzit.no/...

Edit: Saturday-night-whisky spelling mistake.

The metric designs look A LOT like the Euro notes.

I also like the new Canadian passport pages, which have clever highlighting under UV light [0] and this Hungarian EUR 20 note is inspired, with UV light showing the skeletal structure of the pictured bird [1] but sadly its just a mock-up from a final-year project by a design student...

[0] http://imgur.com/gallery/3u8xP [1] http://www.designboom.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/barbara...

Well before that, the Slovenian passport had a man on horseback galloping along the outside edges. You can see the blue icon in a couple of positions here:

http://www.twenty.si/uploads/pics/Licul.6_01.jpg

Much easier to spot removed pages than with the subtle Finnish design.

French hasn't been the been the modern lingua franca for some time, it's obviously English (well, actually many variants of English) now.

The ICAO still recommends to issue passports in English and French _or_ in the national language plus English or French although using the national language(s) plus English and French is still common in Europe.

European Union passports even use all official EU languages as far as I know (I cannot check right now).

More likely you'll end up with one of the last ones. Generally it is good to keep at least 6 months of validity on your passport if you plan on using it.

Depending on the country, it might be more difficult to renew it after it has expired than shortly before.

What country is your main passport?

You could wait one day to renew it, no?

Your comment made me curious about the design of New Zealand passports, which eventually led me to this atlas of passport covers:

https://www.passportindex.org/

Here's New Zealand's distinctive design:

https://www.passportindex.org/countries/nz.png

But I prefer the elegant minimalism from Switzerland:

https://www.passportindex.org/countries/ch.png

De gustibus non est disputandum. :-)

They are for legal residents without the ability to get proper documents from their home countries. My guess is primarily "refugees" that haven't gone through the full citizenship process.

https://www.udi.no/en/want-to-apply/immigrants-passport-and-...

In my case? I accidentally fell in love with a Norwegian some years back. If I have my date and time stuff correct, I should be able to apply to get one in late summer/early autumn.

Of course, the path to that stuff also includes language learning and civics and all that stuff too.

The new US ones aren't too bad (nice pictures and quotes in them) but they are definitely very traditional. My family has a mix of American and New Zealand passports and the US on looks a little boring compared to the kiwi ones!

You're totally right, the paper passport could be considered a strange object in a very electronic world.

However, in my experience, truly electronically equipped borders are the edge case. The countries that take e-passports without any agent interaction are fee and far between, and typically only service citizens of that country.

Perhaps you're fortunate enough to travel in a selection of bleeding edge countries, via plane. Many, many people use land borders, and most land borders don't have electronic systems.

For an electronic system to work, you'd need 100% coverage of every border, or the system breaks - and that's hard to pull off.

The flip side is that there are security flaws with partial electronic systems. My country passed a law against travel to Iraq / Afghanistan for citizens, and yet, because they have 100% electronic border control for citizens, (and Iraq / Afghanistan don't..) - my passport has never been checked, despite having 'illegal' visas plain to see.

The point of the passport is that information in there is readable easily. I can easily check my visa state as can the cop checking me somewhere. Also the passport can be checked by a porential employer to verify my integration state which might include a working permission. Also mind that in many countries of the world (i.e. in many African countries) technology is of limited availability. Any digital form would require data exchange formats and protocols. Printing/stamping/sticking can be done everywhere easily and the protocol "paper pages of size 125 mm × 88 mm" is trivial.

The thing you describe essentially also exists in many countries as a ID already, which I.e. can be enough for EU citizens to travel within the EU.

The EU countries have something very similar to that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_the...

Majority of countries that allow visa-free entry for citizen from 1st world countries won't have any data on particular citizens.

U.S. Government won't upload a dump of personal data of its citizens to Thailand or Indonesia, would it?

Moreover, if local governments would want this data from everyone let in without a visa (for TH and ID it's almost every country in the world except, probably, Africa) they'd end up with data on roughly 3 bln people. They don't have IT infrastructure to deal with it. This data will also be out of sync the second it's dumped from origins.

So, when you're being processed in Bali by border control on your first entry, the only thing they can do is confirm the validity of your document's physical properties, but not the identity it represents.

For land/sea crossings between Canada and the US, there exists such a thing -- it's known as an Enhanced Drivers License and contains a barcode and RFID chip in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Drivers_License

But the Federal government can't mandate having these machine-readable identifiers on the State-issued drivers licenses, so we're stuck with Passport Cards and Passport Books in addition to the EDL.

If by "most countries in the world" you mean first world countries - the EU numbers 28, add in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc. you might get up to 40-50 countries where this is a reasonable expectation. I am sure there are even edge cases along the US-Canada border where the crossings aren't all electronic since it is overkill when 99% of the people crossing are locals.

There are 180-200 countries in the world. You characterisation of the vast majority of them as "very third-world" is rather crass. You are also ignoring possible police stops inside of foreign countries. In order to ask for a bribe, they check that you have all of your paperwork in order.

For (1), The Schengen area has already implemented this for EU countries with national identity card schemes. In contrast, the US doesn't have a national identity card scheme so you still need a passport (booklet by air, card by land or sea). Even illegal immigrants can get an ID card or Driver's license in California, for instance.

For (2), some countries just want to collect a little fee and don't care much beyond that as long as you stay for less than 30 or 90 days.

For (3), the US, for instance, extends the Visa Waiver Program to any country when the Visa reject rate drops low enough. I think you are greatly overestimating the level of cooperation between countries on visa policy.

it seems to be the trend, like the elimination of cash.

Again, this trend is limited to very first world countries. In most of the world, cash is still king.

The history of passports is quite fascinating:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30988833

Your from a country in which privacy isn't particularly valued I take it? I think you're heavily overestimating how much data is available to governments.

It's still an important component of human-oriented societies, to permit the individual to inform you of who they claim to be.

You rob individuals of agency, when you start dictating to them who you've declared them to be.

If two identical twins appear becore you, wearing sunglasses and gloves, are you going to demand that they remove their accessories, so that your special machine can declare them honest?

Sounds like an alienating place. How far will this go, once a person crosses the threshold, and steps into such a zone of absolute identity? Smart people might wish to stay the hell away from such a place.

Smart people might prefer a place that permits them the dignity of producing an artifact from their pockets, rather than acquiescing to a medical inspection.

We seem to have a knack for including portrait drawings that look like a bad DeviantArt fan-art. That Shakespeare picture is pretty goofy, and the Clydesdale Bank 20 GBP note has a particularly awful depiction of Robert The Bruce, for example: http://www.britishnotes.co.uk/news_and_info/scottishlatestne...

Wow, those look awful. The subtitle "Why must the UK passport look like a clumsy photocopied moodboard? is an apt description.

The canadian passport has apparently used UV-reactive ink since at least 2003: http://imgur.com/gallery/3u8xP contrasts the "old" canadian passport's UV pages to the "new" one's, the new one (biometric/ePassport) was introduced in 2013, the previous one was introduced in 2003.