Italian designer Riccardo Cambó has redesigned Italy’s driving license and ID card as a matched physical-and-digital set, shrinking the numbered form fields that dominate the current documents down to superscripts and handing the space to a personification of the nation older than the nation itself. Cambó, who publishes as Breccia, led the UX and the layouts and commissioned the branding from Aperto, an Italian communication design studio. The starting point is a format problem rather than a stylistic one: the card was drawn to be read inside a wallet, and it now has to hold up on a phone.
A wallet format on a screen is the mismatch that set the project going. Italy runs a public app in which citizens can store their documents and produce them on demand, and moving the card there exposed something nobody had solved. “In Italy, we have an app where we can upload our documents, and I realized that the ID card format is great for wallets — but not for phones,” Cambó tells urdesign. Every decision in the Italian driving license redesign descends from that one observation. Numbered lines before names is how the current document is organized: given name and surname occupy separate lines as items 1 and 2, birth date shares a line with birthplace as item 3, and issue and expiry sit as 4a and 4b with the issuing office wedged between them as 4c. The sequence was written for a machine-readable European standard rather than for the person holding it, and reading it means reading a list.
The numbers survive on the redesigned card, demoted rather than deleted. The name now runs at headline size across the middle, while the field references shrink to superscripts riding beside plain-language labels — (1,2) tucked after NOME COGNOME (name, surname), (5) after NUMERO DELLA PATENTE (license number), (4a) and (4b) after EMISSIONE and SCADENZA (issue and expiry). The handwritten signature block that occupies item 7 on the current license does not appear on the redesigned front. Rules bent on purpose are part of how Cambó works, and he says so without hedging: “I’m a UX designer, and online I often create redesigns that don’t always follow every rule — but that gives me the freedom to experiment, be creative, and have fun,” he tells urdesign. He kept the UX, the layouts and the final designs; the branding is the one component he handed to somebody else.
Orientation does most of the work here. The physical license stays landscape, because a wallet is still a wallet, while both digital identity documents rotate to portrait inside the app, sized to a thumb rather than to a leather slot and stacked under the heading I tuoi documenti (your documents) with pagination dots beneath. Two carriers, two geometries, one design system. Data the plastic cannot hold is what the screen version adds once it stops imitating a card: the digital license carries a live account of Italy’s points system, a speeding violation named and costed at five points, a running total of 15 out of 20 remaining, and a countdown of 230 days until the next two points are restored. None of that exists on the physical document, which has no surface on which such a figure could change.
Two colors, two issuers separate the pair. The license runs magenta and is credited to the Ministero delle Infrastrutture e dei Trasporti (Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport); the identity card in the Italian ID card redesign runs blue and is credited, in the mockup, to the Comune di Milano (Milan’s municipal authority). Other national programs have pushed the same distinction to the surface — Switzerland rebuilt its passport around a water motif in a comparable move from bureaucratic artifact toward designed object. The branding came second, and Aperto took it on request: what drew the studio in was the double status of the two objects, bound to a person as closely as anything can be, and at the same time worn, pocketed and produced in front of strangers. “They’re the keys we use to state to others who we are,” Aperto tells urdesign. Nine days after the first exchange, four directions had gone back to Cambó, before layout work had begun.
Symbols that lost are as instructive as the one that won. The strawberry tree, a natural tricolor that Pascoli consecrated as the Italic tree. Savoy blue, traced forward to the blue of the IO app, which Italians use to reach public administration services. The cogwheel with laurel and olive lifted from the emblem of the Republic. “All beautiful, and all without a living personality,” the studio tells urdesign — the criterion that left Italia Turrita, or Turreted Italy, standing alone. Her crown is a city wall, not a dynastic one, and that distinction is the whole reason she was chosen: she is a woman, as almost all European national personifications are, from Marianne to Britannia to Germania, which gives her the capacity to act rather than merely to signify. The turreted crown she wears is older than the country that now uses it — an attribute of the goddess Cybele, the Great Mother, worn to stand for all the cities under her protection, before it passed to the goddess Roma and into civic heraldry.
A coin struck in revolt carries her first appearance. Italy as a figure surfaces on a coin minted at Corfinio, in Abruzzo, in 91 BC, during the Social War — the emblem of the Italic peoples then in revolt against Rome, some nineteen centuries before the country existed. The towers arrived later, on Trajan’s Arch at Benevento. Cesare Ripa fixed her canonical attributes in the Iconologia of 1593, the illustration followed in 1603, and artists drew on it for two hundred years. Already in the pocket is the studio’s position on why she was the correct answer: she peaked during the Risorgimento as the face of unification, nearly vanished once the country was made, and returned in 1946 on the referendum ballot, set opposite the Savoy coat of arms — then stayed on hundred-lira coins, on stamps, and on the reverse of the old paper ID card. “We didn’t introduce her. She was already in Italians’ pockets. We only wanted her to be seen again,” Aperto tells urdesign.
Five drawings, one survivor is how she reached her final form, and the winner was decided on a technical criterion rather than an aesthetic one. The holographic version was “the only one that survived the jump from print to screen without losing the engraved line” — a print-to-pixel problem currently facing the ten euro banknote designs the ECB has put to a public vote, where hand-drawn and vector line work share the same note.
A weekend, no ambition attached, is how Cambó frames the exercise: “just a speculative design, just to have fun in a weekend,” he tells urdesign. He mentions almost in passing that setting the ID card and the license side by side completes the entire face of Italia Turrita across the two documents. Aperto’s hope for the speculative design project is narrower than adoption — that people begin to look at documents as objects somebody designed — and if whoever actually designs them ever wanted to talk, the door is open. “We’re called Aperto for a reason!”
The form is still there, printed at a size that assumes nobody will look for it. Every field reference on the current license survives on the redesigned one, unchanged in meaning and untouched in sequence, reduced to a superscript beside a word a person can read. The machine still gets its list. It just has to wait its turn now, behind a name and a face, in a queue it has never had to stand in before.