How I created ‘that’ passport mockup
Let’s embark on a journey through my mind as I describe the moments and the creative process behind designing the futuristic Nigerian passport you saw. As at the time of writing this, the posts carrying the design has amassed nearly 100k impressions across LinkedIn and Twitter (X) together. A high number for two accounts one just two-month old and the other with less than 2k followers.
You don’t need to know about 3D design because that’ll be one-fourth of what I’ll discuss. I’m writing this based on the request of many. We begin.
Leye Ogunsanya put out a post on X (formerly Twitter). The post carried visual concept design via Figma of a futuristic Nigerian passport. The caption to the post read “The year is 2050”
I wouldn’t call myself a good user of social media but I happened to come across the tweet. Immediately I saw it, I knew something even better could come out of this if recreated as a real mockup in 3D. I’ll do a break down of what I saw in a moment.
Apart from having this pressing need to pour out my own style on what I saw to be a design of great potential, I needed to be the first to do it. Ideas are everywhere. Everyone can say what they can do to make something better, only few actually do. As long as the post is still up, many like myself are also looking at this post and trying to see what they can do to it. If someone ends up doing it before me, I might lose that vision in mind. My advantage here is I have a visual idea of what the outcome might look like. Some days prior to this, I spent most of my days watching tutorials on layering materials in 3D, I hadn’t even known what that knowledge will be used for. It turns out, it helped in making my ideas into reality.
I’d like to preach here:
You need to act on your ideas as soon as you can. There’s a part of you that brings those ideas to you. You need to reward it by acting on them. The more you act on your ideas, the more that part of you brings more ideas. If you end up not listening to it, you get nothing afterwards. You also need to keep gathering skills and learning to the point where your ideas are implementable
Back to my story.
I sent a DM to Leye requesting access to the file. The gravity of what I was about to do required me taking the design apart and building it back up in the 3D tool — Blender. He responded and I got access to the file. Work started. Quick sermon again, I promise.
Working over something another person already created requires a great deal of understanding. You need to go into the mind of the original designer and ask yourself “What were they trying to achieve by using this element or this effect?” You owe a responsiblity to leave that work better than it was while keeping the original creator in mind.
Remember when I said I saw the design and I already had a vision of what it’d look like, well, here’s where that comes in. Let’s do a breakdown.
Here’s what the front looked like:
The first thing I saw wasn’t even the most most glaring. I saw the coat of arms sitting on a chip at the bottom right hand side. From there, I knew this passport MUST have a gold foil at the end. Why? Because it’s probably what the original creator intended. Also, chips are known to have a metallic feel. Only gold could match that feel for this particular design. So, in my mind, I thought: “Coat of arms has this bright colour on a chip that’s definitely gold. Hence, my 3D materials should include a gold texure.
Then, I saw some parts with gradients. I knew already that the creator (Leye) was trying to show a shiny feel to that part. So, wherever I saw a gradient, I told myself it has to be a shiny label.
The third part to my analysis, which was major, was that shadows almost always represent elevation and demotion. Outer shadows in 2D represent things above the surface in the real world. Inner shadows in 2D represent demoted or pressed in surface. In 3D and print, you call this embossing and debossing. To emboss is to leave an elevated imprint on your design, while to deboss is to leave a depressed imprint on your design. This meant that some elements like names would require embossing even if they have no shadows because they’re important elements.
A summary of the analysis:
Coat of arms of chip = gold foil / texture
Gradients on design = shiny or glossy foil
Use of shadows on elements = elevated or depressed
When it was time to export, I used these ideas to prepare my file. If you have no idea of how 3D works and you see the black and white images, just know they’re called maps. Maps are images that tell how certain effects should be applied to your 3D object (model). In this export, I made use of bump maps to bump surfaces up or down so I can achieve the elevated feel, roughness maps to make some parts shiny while others are rough, etc.
Map texture images are usually in black and white. The darker the parts of the images, the less the the effects will be, the lighter the part, the more pronounced the effect will be. So, a black part of the image means no effect while a white part means full effect. Grey areas are lke you guessed, mid ranges.
Here was how I exported:
At this point, we’re getting technical and it may not be of help to many but you get the idea of what we needed to achieve. I’ll leave the technical parts out for now. When people need help on that I might drop a more techinical article.
The outcome of the process like you might have known got us these:
If you read to this point, you probably were really interested in the process. I thank you. An easter egg here for you is that I saw another post by Victor Fatanmi where he sketched a chair and I’m looking at that. But time is a big constraint for me nowadays. If you’d like me to convert that one into a real product also, let me know. There’s always a lot to do nowadays.
I’d like to thank Leye for making the files available too. I hope we did justice to the work of art.
Best.
