The Treasury is ready to revamp our cash again, only a few years after it redesigned our money to thwart counterfeiters. Obviously, that redesign didn’t do the job. This time, they’re adding color to the bills.
As a designer, I have often wondered why our money is so incredibly boring. I suppose that the Treasury wishes to create – or continue – a feeling of stability and blandness, thus ensuring trust in the dollar. But it’s so incredibly easy to counterfeit such a document.
One of the coolest currency designs I’ve seen is by R.D.E. Oxenaar in the Netherlands. It’s easy to tell what denomination you have from the color, and he chose colors very deliberately based upon the fact that it’s difficult to match colors using color copiers and scanners. For instance, when you try to color correct the red on the bank note, the blue becomes wrong. When you compensate for the blue, the green gets messed up. Brilliant! There are also partial images of rabbits and other animals which become whole when held up to the light. My favorite is the now defunct 250 guilder note with a lighthouse. Of course, now all those great European bank notes have been replaced by the Euro – which is OK, with different styles of European architecture on each one. But the Euro coins… ick. There is a plan to embed RFID chips in the Euro, which would make it difficult to copy, but also make it possible to track your cash.
The Canadian currency features raised dots, high-contrast numbers, and an electronic reader for the vision-impaired. Cool. American cash must be impossible to figure out if you’re blind. New Zealand, which uses plasticized cash, has water-themed (and hip surfer) currency designs, with hard to duplicate color combinations.
Ours is just boring. Tune in tomorrow to see what pointless change has been wrought by the Treasury, the people who brought you the Sacajawea dollar coin. How convenient it is to carry 5 or 6 clanking, heavy coins in your pocket instead of a folded piece of paper! Geniuses!
Ooh, interesting. I’ll be looking forward to the money makeover. Yeah, a couple of years ago I was in Amsterdam for a few days, and was so enamored of the currency that I didn’t want to spend it! But spend I did. I was most sad to part with a fifty guilder (sunflower) note, and my sole monetary souvenir from that trip is a ten guilder (kingfisher). There’s a whole poem in microscopic print on the back, for which I’m now determined to find a translation…
Yes, the guilders were always my favorite currency as well, and the Belgian francs were pretty cool, too.
They’ve unveiled the new twenty, and it’s… still boring. They’ve merely added some subtle color and some very minor design changes to pretty much the same old big-headed Andrew Jackson.
I didn’t really expect anything nicer, but a boy can dream.
Yeah, just checked out the new twenty. Same old everything. The Treasury folks are big on security, but obviously don’t see style as a means to that end. I’m thinking we’ll probably have that same font forever. Setting the dollar amount on the reverse in a large, sans-serif font (from the last re-design) is the boldest move yet, which isn’t saying much. Couldn’t they at least colorize the scenes on the reverse? It’s about as exciting as the “Wall Street Journal.”
Ha, Thom: “big-headed Andrew Jackson”… that had me chuckling.
Eh. I’m not too excited. Although I must say that I can see the beginnings of a design that is more European. Especially with the removal of the oval around the portrait.
The Fed’s interactive Flash tour of the new note includes a “backlight” feature, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why (other than the watermark). When held up to the light, the $20 bill looks like a jumbled mess. Why didn’t they design something that face on was incomplete, which then became complete when held up to the light? Perhaps the registration on the Treasury presses isn’t up to the challenge.