Visa History

This graphic vision is one of my favorites, and a very early example of The Grove’s history maps. It was created before the illustrator programs were robust enough to handle this level of graphics (in the late 1980s) Everything was hand drawn, including the little credit cards. The history was created to support a new employee training program called Passport to Visa. Senior managers would come in, stand in front of the big mural, and improvise telling the story to the new employees. Since all the facts they needed were on the big chart, they could focus easily on the color and texture of their stories. The VISA management loved this history so much they gave a framed version to all of their member banks one Christmas, and have ordered at least three extensions of the history over the years. It illustrates eight layers of information. From the top, which show external evens coming in, it includes marketing messages in talk balloons, products as credit card pictures, the main revenue line, internal organizational projects as arrows, system improvements and foundational layers, international offices as additional foundational arrows, and big eras.