Ohiodave

Dolla Dolla Billz Y’All

So I twittered earlier about the Dollar Redesign Project. I said that the project was cool, but all the designs posted so far were hideous. Within 20 minutes, the owner of the blog had tracked me down and rebutted that he’d love to see what I would do. Touché, internet.

I really do like the site and think the dollar needs a refresh, but I’m not going to post any redesigned dollars for the following reasons:

1. I don’t know thing one about designing currency.
2. I can’t point out good currency design, only bad.
   All the designs on the Dollar Redesign site are either jokes, statements (I especially like the one where all the money looks like barcode labels), or inspired by the Euro, the Australian dollar, and other neon, sans-serif-loving monstrosities. I like clean lines and modern design in a lot of things, but money isn’t one of them. I also think that more color in money is not necessarily a good thing.
3. Anything designed on a bet is bound to be terrible.

A semi-related anecdote

Recently I had to take a logo designed for the U.S. market, in which a character was holding a stack of greenbacks, and convert it for use in Canada. I agonized over how to represent Canadian dollars, given that Canadian money has changed appearance many times over the years and didn’t seem to have a strong visual metaphor the way U.S. dollars do.

Money has a certain look in America: Bills are basically duotone - black and another color. There is a border around the edges and a rounded area in the middle that may or may not feature a portrait. You can play around with most of the elements and still not lose the basic connotation of money, as opposed to any old piece of paper.

I asked a Canadian co-worker whether (a) using U.S. money in the Canadian logo would be insulting, and (b) if he knew of a visual metaphor that would play in Canada. He said that (a) yes, it probably would, and (b) suggested maybe a handful of Loonies (Canadian dollar coins). Unfortunately, the logo was too small for the coins to show up clearly.In the end I modified the bills to look vaguely like the new Canadian $20 bill, which has a green bar on top and a white bottom, but I wasn’t completely happy with the result.

About a month later I went to Toronto on vacation, and walking down Yonge Street I happened to see an ad with a caricature of Canadian money. The ad used the familiar U.S. greenback shape, but the stack of dollars alternated green and red. This seemed like kind of a cop-out to me.

A final word of caution to U.S. dollar redesigners: Don’t end up like Canada. Push the dollar in new directions, but don’t throw away 100+ years of brand equity and force a lot of designers to reinvent the wheel like I tried to, or use an inappropriate metaphor the way the designer in Toronto did.

Do any non-Americans read this blog? I’d like to get some opinions and learn how “money” in the generic sense is represented in other countries.