Brazil Reboots its Travel Documents

In this, the first major redesign of the country’s travel document for over two decades, the Casa da Moeda do Brasil has pulled out all the stops to make the new Brazilian passport a real showstopper!

Brazil has four separate time zones and a total land area of approximately 8.5 million square kilometres, making it the fifth largest country in the world by land area. It has five different land regions and approximately 7,500 kilometres of coast along the Atlantic Ocean and six distinct biomes.

It was this natural diversity and the richness of its people, traditions, flora and fauna that the team at Casa da Moeda do Brasil, and their clients at the Federal Police and the Ministry of Foreign Relations wanted to capture in the new passport.

As Millie Britto, Head of Design at Casa da Moeda put it during her presentation at the recent High Security Print™ (HSP) LatAm Conference in the Bahamas, ‘a passport isn’t only an official document of a country. It’s also a ‘visiting card’ for its citizens when travelling around the world.’ 

This commitment ‘to allowing each citizen the right to feel represented, honoured and recognised as well as learn about the great natural and cultural diversity of their country’ is what lead Millie and the team (which included the Head of Forensics, Products and Raw Materials, Nadia Sepulveda, and Juliana Souze, one of the designers, together with Jose Carlos Braga and Marise Silva) to embark on an iconographic research mission of the country.

Over several years, the team visited museums, libraries and other reference sites to conduct deep research to ensure that the people of Brazil – Indigenous, afro descendants and immigrants – were properly represented. Along their journey, they met Prof Antonio Carlos de Freitas, who not only gave them access to his professional image bank but also acted as a guide as to which animal or plant originates from which biome and region.

Prof Antonio Carlos de Freitas.

With a bachelor’s degree in physics, a master’s in biology, doctorate in biophysics and the coordinator for the Centre of Scientific Environmental Photography from Rio de Janeiro State University, Prof de Freitas fully justifies his position as curator and conscience of the project. ‘He is a key person to this project and acknowledging his value is really important to us,’ Millie said.

After securing the rights for all of the images to be used in designing the passport, it was time to start the next phase of the project. The team set out to design the passport with the following guiding principles in mind: to observe new trends in modern passports, comply with ICAO guidelines, promote technological improvements and keep production costs at current levels.

Casa da Moeda and the Federal Police forensics team attended seminars, lectures and made technical visits before coming up with the security features for the new document.

The cover has a contactless chip, gold foil hot stamping and embossing on the right edge.

The biodata page has an offset security background, bar code, bearer’s biodata, laser perforation, holographic security laminate, secondary image and an alphanumeric code on page 3.

Biopage (© Ministry of Foreign Relations).

The substrate on the inside back cover has a UV-sensitive watermark, responding to 365nm (green). The substrate used on the inner pages is a chemically sensitive paper with electrotype watermark, and mould made watermark coat of arms on the biodata page.

Other inner pages contain mould made watermarks for each of the six biomes of Brazil: Cerrado, Atlantic Forest, Caatinga, Amazon, Pantanal and Pampas.

Tricoloured UV-sensitive sewing thread is used for the stitching and there are invisible fluorescent bicoloured security fibres embedded in the paper as well as a UV-sensitive security thread.

There are laser perforations from page 3 onwards, including the back cover and for the inner pages the offset print used rainbow plates to customise each biome with a main colour so that as you leaf through the passport you can see changes in the dominant colour.

The inside back cover has three colour Orlof intaglio, a latent image and positive microtext as well as magenta / green optically variable ink, spelling ‘BRA’.

The result of all of this research, planning and attention to detail is a passport that raises the eyebrows of users and security print professionals alike. So, it was not surprising that the Brazilian passport jointly won the best new passport category at an award ceremony held as part of the HSP LatAm Conference.

In presenting the award, the conference organisers Reconnaissance noted that in this age of ‘dematerialisation’, where identity is increasingly represented as a series of 1’s and 0’s, it’s really inspiring to witness the care and enthusiasm that the team at Casa da Moeda do Brasil, and their clients at the Federal Police and the Ministry of Foreign Relations put into producing this beautiful government document. Vai Brasil!