Passport Brand Identity

Passport, a syndicated market research database, is the primary product offering from Euromonitor International. It serves as the hub for a client’s access to Euromonitor’s data, analysis, reports, and data visualisation tools. Initially it had only the name, but I was hired to create a brand and visual identity for the product as Euromonitor streamlined almost all its offerings under the single Passport brand. I also worked on designing the interface and, in particular, its data visualisation content before assuming responsibility for the product as a whole, detailed here.

My Function

  • Head of Design
Skills Applied

  • Design leadership
  • Design management
  • Brand design
  • Creative direction
Passport’s primary logo with and without the corporate endorsement and tagline along with child brands launched or proposed.
How Passport and Passport GMID fit into Euromonitor’s brand hierarchy

Logo Design

One of Passport’s unique selling points was the breadth of cross-country comparable data available for over one-hundred countries all across the globe. Through Passport clients could access market data on hundreds of fast-moving consumer good categories, service industries, and other critical components of the industrial economy alongside traditional demographic and econometric data and analysis.  

Passport evolved from multiple earlier products and by my arrival had settled into two offerings: Passport and Passport GMID, which was itself destined to eventually merge into Passport, unifying the brands. These different systems and the types and depth of data allowed for a product fit for a wide array of client types, and these areas and depth of research across the world became the foundation for the identity system. 

The mark comprises a pie chart of six unequal slices, representing Earth’s six inhabited continents. Each slice features a distinct radius, referring to the different amounts and types of data for various regions and the six areas of research. The two primary angles represent the 23.5º axial tilt of Earth and the horizontal angle the traditional representation of the Equator. These divided the globe into two halves or hemispheres represented by the colours, which also reflect the pillars of Passport’s content: data and analysis.

Design Team Brand

  • Head of Design
  • 1 × senior designer
  • 2 × designers
The meaning behind Passport’s symbol.
Information graphic detailing how Passport worked for different client types.
Euromonitor needed a strong and flexible brand to simplify its product portfolio into one core line: Passport.

Type, Colour, and Iconography, Oh My!

Whereas Passport’s parent brand, Euromonitor, found its root in people warm and quirky, Passport was a data-driven, analytical tool and its colours hewed to cooler shades of blue. The primary typeface, Avenir Next, is a geometric sans serif I paired with the slab serif Rockwell. Passport and Euromonitor also shared an iconography, particularly with industry icons depicting the company’s coverage. 

Passport featured two primary colours: a bright blue and the blue-grey Euromonitor Slate used in Euromonitor’s brand. Slate allowed us to tie the two brands together—as we later did with research monitor and Euromonitor Consulting—whilst Passport Blue offered a sharp contrast to Euromonitor Orange. The palette also drew upon black as a secondary colour, giving a wide range of neutral greys when necessary. Additionally, because of the need for a wide range of colour for data visualisation purposes, an expanded palette featured most of the rest of the traditional colours, which were then optimised for a data visualisation palette. To differentiate between neutrals, I also included a hatch pattern for use in “n/a” like situations.

Typographically Avenir Next allowed Passport two critical features. First, its varied widths allowed for condensed widths, which assisted with the design of dense data displays, e.g. large digit numbers in small spaces. Secondly, the availability of full Latin character sets in addition to Cyrillic and Arabic made the typeface useful for internationalisation purposes. Notably, in my planned but uncompleted next version update of Passport’s brand, I would have replaced Avenir Next with Proxima Nova, as I had with Euromonitor’s brand. The switch would have allowed for more flexibility and would have aligned with updates I made to Passport’s UX/UI design that incorporated Proxima Nova.

Industries Covered

  • 20×20 pixel set
  • 40×40 pixel set
  • 80×80 pixel set
  • 42 industries covered
The colour and typography of Passport.
The 20×20 and 40×40 pixel versions of the industry icons, organised by their internal groupings.
The larger 80×80 pixel versions of the industry icons.

Guidelines

Global content production teams require standards and guidelines if products and content need to look and feel consistent. And Euromonitor’s Passport, with its team of analysts distributed on all six inhabited continents, was no exception. 

One special area of focus for Passport’s brand was around information design and data visualisation. Because one of Passport’s primary functions was to display data both tabularly and via charting and mapping, it needed special attention on how the brand applied to those areas. I spent a lot of time honing the guidelines to work especially for those areas and ultimately created a branded look for the product.

Having guidelines, however, is one thing. Generating consensus and buy-in on guidelines—let alone compliance with—is another. To that end we had travelling road shows wherein I or someone from my team would refresh minds on existing standards, highlight recent updates, and solicit input and feedback on potential improvements or areas for reinforcement with the current guidelines.

From the Passport brand guidelines detailing with colour and how it applies to data visualisation.
From the Passport brand guidelines detailing with information design, data visualisation, and charting.

Templates

Despite the availability of guidelines, manuals, trainings, and refreshers, not everyone has an eye for design. Thus, we designed templates allowing analysts to focus on the content instead of the fonts, colours, and margins. As part of the Design Standardisation Committee, I also oversaw the creation of special graphics to be used when concepts, e.g. methodologies, were explained so everyone’s content was both precise and consistent.

Perhaps the most important template was the PowerPoint report template. This was used widely by analysts to write their reports and then went to a production team for editing, proofing, and adherence to the guidelines—editorial and design. From the design side, we provided guidance and files to help both groups create the reports. 

Second to those reports, however, were the charts and graphics used throughout Passport, which hosted not just data and reports but content native to the product in its bespoke CMS. For all these graphics, we had a separate Excel template, which allowed analysts to create correctly sized charts and graphics in the proper Passport style. 

Templates for

  • PowerPoint
  • Excel
  • Word
  • InDesign
  • Illustrator
  • Photoshop
  • Bridge
The standard Passport report template, in PowerPoint with green bits for writers and production staff.
Extracts from the Passport Excel charting template, highlighting labelling, line charts, and bar charts.
Extracts from the Passport Excel charting template, highlighting area charts, bubble charts, and combination charts.
Extracts from the Passport Excel charting template, highlighting column charts and some instructions on how to use the generated graphics.

Expressions

Ultimately, Passport’s brand found expression in numerous places, large and small, local and global. The most important, of course, was the product interface itself, which functioned as a hub for Passport-branded content. From the homepage to statistics views, to reports and analysis, to dashboards and vis apps, to datagraphics and infographics, to swag and ephemera, Euromonitor clients and employees could not help but experience the Passport brand and recognise Passport content and offerings for what they were. 

Some Brand Touchpoints

The homepage for Passport.
The statistics view for Passport.
Extracts from the Passport user guide.
The Industry Overview Dashboard.
Several hundred datagraphics were published annually, making them a highly visible brand touchpoint.
The internal tool Grinder produced data extract reports in Excel, which adhered to the Passport brand.
City reports for over 800 cities.
Business dynamics reports.
The About Passport graphic, internally called the Ring of Fire, was a marketing and sales tool showing how each industry related to the others.
The online version of the Country Report, the foundation for the market research data, an analysis of a single market, i.e. a category in a country.
By far the tastiest application of the Passport brand by one of my designers, as a thank you for marking 100 sprints of Passport development.