Visual identity, governance, and the reform of the citizen experience

I. The visual contract of power
The visual landscape of domestic public institutions reflects their organisational structure and operational mindset with clinical precision. What we are witnessing is an unfinished transition, suspended inertly between the pseudo-heraldic reflexes of an authoritarian state – what, after all, does traditional heraldry have to do with an institution born under communism? – and the superficial mimicry of a market economy. From a sociological and psychological perspective, an institution’s visual identity is not a decorative element appended as an afterthought; it is a contract of power, publicly assumed through visual means.

In the domestic public sphere, this contract invariably conveys an asymmetrical, profoundly distorted relationship. The state positions itself as a punitive – or at best indifferent – entity, imposed by force above the citizen, speaking in an anachronistic graphic language. This visual discourse generates alienation, mistrust and civic disengagement. The economic cost of this deficient communication amounts to a massive and ongoing erosion of goodwill. The citizen comes to perceive these entities not as providers of public services funded by his own taxes, but as hostile bastions of an opaque bureaucracy whose primary purpose is self-preservation.

The analysis that follows is not an aesthetic plea for prettier logos on state institutions. It is an examination of the way in which visual identity – understood in its broadest sense, encompassing digital interfaces, physical spaces and every point of contact between the citizen and the administrative apparatus – functions as the expression of a governing philosophy and, equally, as a potential instrument of its reform. The visual bankruptcy of the Romanian state is not an accident. It is the coherent product of identifiable structural mechanisms that, in principle, are correctable.

II. The anatomy of visual failure – Institution by institution

A. The aesthetics of intimidation: Fiscal and regulatory bodies
The visual language of institutions with a collecting and regulatory mandate is dominated by an aesthetics of intimidation, inherited directly from pre-democratic paradigms. ANAF (the National Agency for Fiscal Administration) uses a logo built around a heraldic shield that, paradoxically, carries no genuine heraldic historical meaning. From a semiotic standpoint, the resort to militaristic heraldry in the twenty-first century communicates rigidity, absolute control and coercive force.

The subliminal message, decoded immediately by the collective subconscious, is unambiguous: the taxpayer is not regarded as an essential economic partner in the state’s functioning, but as a subject permanently suspected of evasion, trapped within a unidirectional system of resource extraction. This visual approach forecloses from the outset any premise of voluntary fiscal compliance, transforming every interaction into an act of forced submission under the threat of sanction. The economic implication is direct and systematically ignored by decision-makers: studies in fiscal behaviour consistently document a positive correlation between the perceived legitimacy and fairness of the tax authority and the rate of voluntary compliance. An ANAF brand that communicates partnership and transparency, rather than coercion, is not an aesthetic luxury – it is a public policy intervention with measurable returns.

ANRE (the National Regulatory Authority for Energy) suffers from a distinct but equally severe visual pathology: invisibility through extreme banality. The acronym is treated purely functionally, rendered in a basic typeface devoid of symbolic weight or aesthetic intent. From a sociological perspective, this reflects an institution that evades public accountability and prefers administrative opacity – the aesthetics of bureaucratic camouflage. An authority regulating a market vital to national energy security deliberately chooses not to communicate visual authority, balance, or transparency, but instead to dissolve into the grey backdrop of official paperwork, thereby avoiding public scrutiny and responsibility for decision-making.

B. Cognitive dissonance: The transport sector
The transport sector offers the starkest contrast between the brand’s historical promise and the operational reality on the ground. CFR Calatori (the National Railway Company) retains the winged wheel, a classic industrialist symbol of the nineteenth century. If at its origins this visual construct signified the triumph of engineering over distance, technological progress and the compression of time, today – against the backdrop of the collapsed state of domestic railway infrastructure – it generates profound cognitive dissonance. The semiotics of speed and flight collide head-on with the reality of chronic delays running to dozens of hours, transforming a once-respectable historical emblem into an object of bitter public irony.

Metrorex (Bucharest Subway) operates under a winged letter enclosed within a circle – an eminently technical solution, probably drawn on an engineering draughtsman’s board, entirely devoid of any ambition to become an urban cultural landmark. The message conveyed is one of blunt utilitarianism: the passenger is assimilated to a mass of logistical cargo to be moved underground from one point to another, not to a metropolitan resident interacting with an integrated, humanised mobility system. The enormous opportunity to build civic pride around public transport is thereby squandered – an opportunity successfully exploited by comparable metropolitan systems, from Vienna to Warsaw.

TAROM (the National Air Transport Company) holds, paradoxically, the most valuable visual asset in the entire state portfolio. The swallow in flight, stylised graphically in the nineteen-seventies, is a textbook example of the excellence of domestic modernist design. Geometrically, proportionally and aerodynamically, the composition is impeccable. The tragedy of this brand – if it can still be called a brand – is purely economic and operational. A historical visual identity, however masterfully executed, degrades irreversibly and toxically when the associated service records chronic financial losses and persistent operational failures. The image gradually becomes an empty shell: it no longer sells a promise of future aerial mobility, but rather a melancholic artefact of a past perceived as glorious, highlighting, by contrast, the failure of present management.

C. The extractive mentality: Natural resources and state monopolies
Institutions managing natural resources and state monopolies present visual identities that betray a purely extractive and deeply conservative mentality. ROMSILVA (the National Forestry Administration) uses a shield background with the rudimentary addition of two schematic natural elements – a feudal reminiscence suggesting the armed guard of a state estate against intruders, rather than the responsible stewardship of a shared natural heritage. This visual approach entirely ignores contemporary scientific discourse on ecology, regeneration and sustainable management, preferring to communicate exclusively the state’s prohibitive authority over the raw timber resource.

Hidroelectrica, despite representing arguably the most valuable commercial entity owned by the state today, operated for decades with a banal visual representation of water and energy, reminiscent of the rudimentary solutions of the nineteen-nineties. As a de facto monopoly in the production market, the company felt no competitive pressure to build a strong visual identity. The lack of vision is chronic: the entity remains at the level of a mere technical supplier of kilowatt-hours, systematically missing the opportunity to position itself visually and strategically as a leader in the green energy transition – a narrative of immense value both on international financial markets and in the relationship with domestic public opinion.

D. The ecosystem of inertia: Group portraits
The Romanian Lottery, Romtehnica and the Port of Constanta complete this ecosystem of visual immobility. The Lottery’s coloured clover is a literal, rudimentary and infantilising illustration of luck, entirely disconnected from the current behavioural dynamics and psychology of the global entertainment and gaming industry. Romtehnica and the Port of Constanta employ brutalist, massive, purely industrial typographic treatments that exclude any nuance of strategic communication and convey to international commercial and military partners the image of cumbersome, bureaucratic structures resistant to modernisation – an additional cost signal in any contractual negotiation or international partnership.

Conspicuously absent from the domestic visual inventory is the entire public sector with the highest frequency of citizen contact: the public health system, the state hospital network, the National Health Insurance House. CNAS, the institution that administers health insurance for the entire working population, is practically non-existent as an articulated visual identity. Similarly, the state education system – from county school inspectorates to universities – operates without any identitary coherence, each institution improvising graphic solutions according to the resources and preferences of the leadership of the moment. The Romanian Police presents a rigid, military-style visual identity that communicates punitive authority to the detriment of community proximity – a choice with documented consequences for the relationship between citizen and public order services.

The most undervalued field of state visual identity remains, however, local government. Town halls and county councils represent the highest-frequency interface between the citizen and the state apparatus: building permits, urban planning certificates, social benefits, civil registry services. The identitary cacophony at this level is total: every town hall operates with a pseudo-heraldic shield-type logo, approved by government decree, populated by various symbols drawn with varying degrees of skill, an arbitrary colour palette and communication materials produced according to the budgets and tastes of the administration in office. The consequence is that the citizen benefits from no visual or procedural continuity in interactions with local public administration, regardless of the municipality or county in which they find themselves.

III. Digital architecture – the invisible front of institutional identity
If logos constitute the surface layer of institutional identity, digital architecture represents its functional body. The visual analysis of the state apparatus remains incomplete and, strictly speaking, anachronistic, for as long as it ignores the interfaces through which the citizen effectively interacts with public institutions in 2024. E-governance portals, platforms for filing tax declarations, online appointment systems, and public transport applications constitute the operational visual identity of the state, with direct and measurable consequences for citizen behaviour and administrative costs.

From an interaction design perspective, domestic institutional portals exhibit structural pathologies distinct from those of static graphic identity. Navigation architectures reflect the internal structure of departments, not the logic of citizen needs. The user is required to know the institutional organisational charts to locate a service. Cognitive friction – the central concept of any contemporary theory of public service design – is maximised rather than minimised. The digital form reproduces the paper form, field by field, refusing to exploit evident computational advantages such as pre-populating data already available within state systems, real-time validation, or adaptive guidance. Opaque and intimidating legal-administrative language is transplanted unaltered into the digital interface, annulling any promise of accessibility.

There is, moreover, a structural paradox that goes unobserved in public debate: most partial visual modernisations of recent years have been funded by European funds within fixed-term projects. Visual identity thus becomes a project deliverable rather than an internalised institutional decision. Upon project completion, once the funds and the political cycle of the implementing team are exhausted, the old logic progressively reinstates itself. What we have, consequently, is not reform, but a succession of episodic interventions without continuity, each generating its own layer of contradictory visual stratification.

The most articulate reference model in the European space remains the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service, established in 2011, which explicitly reformulated the mission of governmental design: any public service must be so simple and clear that citizens have no need of external assistance to use it. The principle generated a documented reduction in operational costs and a significant increase in voluntary compliance, including in the fiscal domain. Estonia represents the most radical case study, in which the state’s digital identity preceded and determined institutional reform, rather than the reverse — demonstrating that the visual and interactive infrastructure of governance can function as a vector of administrative modernisation, not merely as a reflection of it. The comparative relevance of the Polish and Czech cases is, for the domestic context, perhaps more immediate: both countries with post-communist trajectories similar to Romania’s completed, over the past two decades, governmental visual identity reforms that produced coherence, reduced the costs of producing communication materials and contributed to an improved public perception of administrative efficiency.

IV. The political economy of immobility – Why the pathology persists
This text would remain in the register of descriptive observation were it to content itself with cataloguing visual pathologies without dissecting the structural mechanisms that reproduce them cyclically. The visual immobility of domestic public administration is not the result of individual incompetence – though that plays a role – but of a system of incentives that renders qualitative reform nearly impossible.

The first and most decisive mechanism is the legislative framework governing public procurement. In the absence of any normative standard defining institutional visual identity as an object of public policy, the procurement of creative services is governed exclusively by the criterion of the lowest price. The result is predictable: the cheapest bidder wins, not the most competent. Quality design – which involves research, testing with real users, iteration and strategic expertise – cannot compete with graphic solutions produced rapidly and sold at dumping prices. The public procurement law, in its current form, functions as an inverse selection mechanism that systematically eliminates excellence and rewards mediocrity.

The second mechanism is the rapid political rotation of decision-makers. The four-year electoral cycle, combined with the instability of governing coalitions, yields a real average ministerial tenure of approximately 18 months to 2 years. No serious visual identity reform – involving research, public consultation, gradual implementation and impact evaluation – can be conceived, initiated and completed within this interval. The minister or secretary of state who would initiate such a reform will no longer hold office by the time it is finalised and will therefore not reap the political benefits. The incentive structure discourages any investment with a time horizon longer than one electoral cycle.

The third mechanism is the absence of internal capacity to evaluate creative quality within the administrative apparatus. The communication departments of ministries and agencies are, in general, politically subordinate and staffed by personnel whose professional training in strategic design is broadly absent and a matter of indifference. Consequently, the state lacks the internal capacity to formulate quality specifications for the creative services it procures, to evaluate bids by any criterion other than price, or to manage implementation processes. This structural competence gap is self-perpetuating: the state does not know what to ask for, how to evaluate what it receives, or how to use what it acquires.

The fourth mechanism, more subtle, is the absence of any public design policy at central government level. Romania has no equivalent of the British Government Digital Service, the Finnish or British Design Council, or any central structure with an explicit mandate to define and maintain the visual and interactive standards of state communication. Each ministry and agency is left to improvise independently, inevitably generating the current visual cacophony.

V. Systemic reform – Solutions

A. The overlooked precondition: The normative framework
Any debate on the reform of institutional visual identity that omits the legislative framework risks remaining in the essayistic register. Structural reform requires, prior to any design intervention, the adoption of a minimal normative framework that defines institutional visual identity as an object of public policy, establishes evaluation and approval competencies at the central government level and eliminates the exclusive price criterion from creative services procurement. Without this normative intervention, any other reform initiative risks remaining dependent on the individual will of a minister or secretary of state and being reversible at the next change of government.

The introduction of mandatory quality criteria and multifactorial evaluation procedures into public procurement of creative services does not require a fundamental revision of the public procurement law – a legislative undertaking of unpredictable duration and outcome. It can be achieved, to a significant degree, by ministerial order or government decision establishing minimum technical standards and evaluation procedures specific to the creative services category, analogous to the way in which specific technical standards already exist for infrastructure or IT procurement.

B. The unification of governmental visual architecture
The first structural alternative is the alignment of all entities under a monolithic visual identity system: a single visual template, a single national colour scheme and a single official typeface family for the entire central apparatus and its subordinate agencies. The theoretical advantages are considerable: the elimination of the current visual cacophony, the projection of an image of coherence and unified state authority, the reduction of production costs through standardisation and, critically, the creation of conditions for a coherent digital architecture.

The limitations of this approach are, nevertheless, significant. A monolithic system applied uniformly to an administrative structure as heterogeneous as the Romanian state risks producing formal coherence without substance, erasing the legitimate differences in mission and audience between institutions and generating a bureaucracy of visual compliance equally paralysing as the current anarchy. There is, moreover, a political risk: a project of this scale, centrally contracted and implemented by a single team or company, becomes vulnerable to political capture and conflicts of interest that are difficult to manage within the current public procurement framework.

C. Individual institutional rebranding
This solution involves the modernisation of each institution individually, respecting its historical individuality and the specificity of its mission, while bringing the visual language up to contemporary standards. The process entails contracting specialised teams through transparent public tenders, using multifactorial evaluation criteria that go beyond the logic of lowest price. The principal advantage is flexibility and the ability to build genuinely specific and meaningful visual identities, rather than generic solutions applied in series.

The principal vulnerability is coordination: in the absence of a central normative framework and common minimum standards, the risk is the production of a further layer of cacophony – this time a modernist-aesthetic one rather than the current archaic-heraldic one. What is needed, therefore, is a hybrid solution: common central standards for the identity elements that must communicate belonging to the state apparatus, combined with individual institutional freedom of expression within those parameters.

D. Reform through demonstrative pilot — The pragmatic path
To the alternatives presented, a third path may be added – more pragmatic in light of real political and budgetary constraints: reform through a demonstrative institutional pilot. The logic is as follows: in the absence of political will for systemic reform and in the face of natural administrative inertia, the most effective instrument of change is the production of irrefutable empirical evidence regarding the impact of visual and functional reform.

The selection of two or three institutions with high public visibility and leadership receptive to reform, subjected to a rigorous redesign process covering the entire citizen experience – visual identity, public communication, digital interfaces, physical spaces – can generate quantifiable evidence of impact. Relevant indicators include the rate of voluntary compliance, the frequency of errors when completing forms, the number of assistance requests, the level of user satisfaction measured in a standardised way, and public perception of the institution, monitored through longitudinal surveys. The evidence produced by the pilot programme transforms the debate about design from an aesthetic one to an economic one – the only register with real persuasive power in the domestic decision-making context.

The most suitable candidate for such a pilot is, in my view, ANAF – precisely because of the direct and measurable economic impact of voluntary fiscal compliance. An increase of a few percentage points in the voluntary compliance rate, generated in part by a reform of institutional identity and citizen experience, produces additional fiscal revenues an order of magnitude greater than the total cost of the design intervention.

E. A structural warning: Rebranding as a screen
Any institutional visual reform project must explicitly integrate mechanisms to prevent a phenomenon documented in numerous similar contexts across Eastern Europe and beyond: the use of a modernised visual identity as a symbolic substitute for substantive reform. An agency with a new logo, a responsive website and an impeccable brand manual, but with the same opaque procedures and the same unreformed staff, produces no social value. It, on the contrary, produces amplified cognitive dissonance because the modern visual promise heightens the negative perception of its contradiction with operational reality.

Identity reform must be, in this logic, a consequence of institutional reform or at least proceed simultaneously with it – never in advance of it as a cosmetic operation. Where deep institutional reform is temporarily impossible due to political or administrative capacity constraints, visual intervention must be limited to components that can genuinely align with actual practice; otherwise, it risks becoming an instrument of legitimation for an unreformed system.

VI. Design as an instrument of governance – A necessary conclusion
The visual bankruptcy of domestic public administration is not an aesthetic accident. It is the coherent product of a governing philosophy that treats the citizen as an object of administration, not as a beneficiary of a service. Visual identity does no more than exteriorise this philosophy with an involuntary honesty that ought, paradoxically, to constitute a point of departure for reform.

The treatment of design as a purely aesthetic exercise added as an afterthought has generated the visual bankruptcy documented in the preceding pages. From an economic and sociological perspective, institutional design must be radically redefined, moving from the status of applied art to that of a public policy instrument, comparable to urban planning or fiscal policy. This redefinition is not an idealist proposal – it is a conclusion supported by empirical evidence accumulated over the past two decades in administrations that have chosen to treat the design of public services as a serious matter of governance.

The transition from an aesthetics of intimidation to an engineering of trust requires more than the contracting of competent designers. It requires a conceptual shift at the level of the political class and decision-making officials: the acceptance that the way the state looks is inseparable from the way the state functions, and that investment in the citizen experience is not a luxury but a component of administrative efficiency with measurable returns. States that have understood this have not spent more. They have spent well and, in return, obtained higher voluntary compliance, a leaner bureaucracy, and a capital of institutional trust that outlasts political cycles.

Romania has, in principle, all the intellectual resources necessary for this transition. And those it lacks, it can purchase. It possesses a design school with a tradition, particularly in Cluj and Bucharest, a creative and technology industry growing at an accelerating pace and a generation of professionals with international experience. What it lacks is not the capacity to imagine a state that looks and behaves differently, but the political will to treat design as a serious matter of public policy and the normative instruments to transform that will into durable reform, independent of electoral cycles.

The real challenge, therefore, is not one of visual competence. It is one of state architecture.