99% Invisible - 54- The Colour of Money (R)

Episode Date: March 25, 2015

United States paper currency is so ubiquitous that to really look at its graphic design with fresh eyes requires some deliberate and focused attention. Pull a greenback out from your wallet (or look at a picture online) and really take … Continue reading →

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I gave a talk, it went great. I'll let everyone know when the video is released. I just had this amazing time, but I'm exhausted and I need a week off to recuperate. So the episode I want to re-broadcast is an old one, but it's a favorite mind. And I remembered it when I was being interviewed on the Ted Stage by Helen Walters. Here's the relevant section of the interview. So Roman, I suspect that you're a really good person to talk to at a cocktail party because you can come up with a really good rant

about whatever's on your mind. What is your other favorite design rant? Favorite design rant. I can complain about US money for a long time. What is it about US money? So that's what this episode is about. My problem with American money. It dates back a few years to when the show

was just a one-man operation. So I hope you like it. While I have you here at the beginning when the show was just a one-man operation, so I hope you like it. While I have you here at the beginning of the show, I have a couple of business items. First is that we have a survey that I'd love for you to fill out. It lets us know how we're doing and demographic data about who you are and what podcast you like. So it would really help us out. Go to survey-nerds.com slash 999. We'll also have a link on our website. It just takes a few minutes. I also want to give an extra shout out to some of the musicians who are

regulars on 99PI. Keegan DeWitt, who I first discovered as the composer of the cold weather soundtrack, we use it a lot. He is brilliant. Okay, Akumi and all the artists on Hell Audio are fantastic. You cannot go wrong with them. The folks at Abandon Building Records in particular, I love the band set in sand and we use this song I'm talking over right now in the credits quite a go wrong with them. The folks at Abandon building records, in particular I love the band set in sand and we use this song I'm talking over right now in the credits quite a bit and everything I say sounds good on top of this song. And last but certainly not least, our pal melodian, who makes music that inspires me on a weekly basis. There are so many more and I'll remind you of them

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US paper currency is so ubiquitous that to really look at its graphic design with fresh eyes requires deliberate and focused attention. So pull out a green back from your wallet or look at a picture online if you're in another country and just really take it in. All the fonts, the busy filigree, the micro-pattern. It's just dreadful. From a pure design, as point of view, it's, I don't know, that's tough because it is a little bit subjective,

but it's horrible. There's like eight fonts on this thing. Typographically, graphically, symbolically. If it'd never been designed before and someone was to submit that as a solution, I think they would just sort of throw it out. And I don't want to get too critical at this point because there are actually pretty compelling and understandable reasons for its particular brand of horribleness. But I think the primary tension embodied in the design of the Greenback boils down to

how my friend Tom Nelson at the blog humans and design puts it. When I handle American money it feels like an artifact because it's so ornate and it has an old look to it. Even though paper currency itself, just the idea of money is a massive world-changing technology, the look and feel of US paper money is very stagnant. It seems like a relic from when our country was founded. Would you buy a car that would still look like the Model T Ford? No, you buy the latest model of it. Things evolve and change with time. That's Richard Smith. He runs a contest called the Dollar Redesign Project. It's become a classic, like classics do, through time and through usage and through familiarity.

So, it's awkwardness from a design point of view has kind of been superseded by its symbolicness. So if you were to start from scratch when we design US paper money, Smith says there are five major areas where we could improve. Number one is color. The idea of using one color doesn't really tell you much other than that we like the color green.

Our largely monochromatic money kind of baffles me. We've introduced a purple five and some peachy hues, but there are a lot of colors and most countries use at least some of them. Number two is size. Oh, why are the American currency, all one size. There's always been a question mark in my head and just never really made sense practically and philosophically.

Having variable-sized coins certainly helps us sort them and you could use the same principle for bills, which leads us to point number three in Smith's manifesto. Functionality. Some functionality that enables people, if they can't see, to clearly distinguish on a very sort of fundamental level, which note is which. The fact that there's no easy way for the blind to use our currency goes beyond bad design,

and it's actually immoral. Then the next fundamental thing I thought was composition. That's number four. Meaning like what it made from? This is a little sort of conception into like where this could go but you know it just seems that a product designer could come in and sort of come out with something really interesting. Recycled material with a smaller carbon footprint are more durable synthetics that last longer and at the very heart of the dollar we design project is number five symbolism. Who should go on the bills and why are the founding fathers? The be all and end all of everything that is America. And I think for me, that's one of the biggest issues

if we were to change anything, I would say that would be where I would start. It could be a platform to celebrate everything that is unique, special, different that you didn't know about America. And that's the suggestion that can get a British expat on his way to American citizenship, like Richard Smith, some colorful hate mail. But it's an intriguing list nonetheless, even if you just view the five suggestions as a philosophical exercise to assess the current design for all of its strengths and faults.

It's hard to imagine all those things being modified on US currency, but it's not hard to imagine each of them being implemented somewhere. In fact, most of them are implemented everywhere. Case in point, Australia. On the other side of the world, each and every one of these five issues have coincidentally been addressed. Let me introduce a masterpiece of Australian design and technology. Australia's new $5 plastic note.

I'm really proud of our money. I have absolutely no idea why I'm so proud of it, but I really am. That's Tristan Cook. And you're about to hear why he's so proud. Tristan and Tom Nelson here from Brief briefly at the top of the show, are user-centered designers, and they run a blog that I'm a big fan of, called Humans and Design. Tristan is Australian, Tom is American,

but Tom went to school in Australia for a couple of years, and the money there made a big impression on him. The money is plastic, and they're all different sizes, and they're colorful. At first, these changes were disconcerting. You'd all just look like toy money to me. But after Tom's initial shock, he began to appreciate all the different design characteristics of Australian currency.

First is the color. $5 is sort of a lavender. $10 is blue with a little bit of a green stripe in it. 20 is... When you look at the ways you can tell the differences between things, generally it's called coding. That's a very simple human factors term for it. And you code through things like size, shape, feel,

and color. So in Australian money, we have ours coded primarily by color, in some ways it's a better index because it doesn't require knowledge of who's on the bill, it only requires recognition of a color. Or an association with a pineapple or a lobster. It's not very common just yet, but we call our notes, cloker and names, but their colors and my two personal favorites are calling the $20 note, which is sort of an orange color, calling it a lobster, and calling the $20 note, which is sort of an orange color, calling it a lobster,

and calling the $50 note, which is sort of a green and yellow color, and calling it a piney, which is short for a pineapple. It's all about the piney's. Number two size. The bills are also different sizes as well, so they feel different in your hand. Sometimes when I've got a bit of cash in my pocket, I can tell the difference between a $5 note and a $20 note because of the feel. I would say that it's about a centimeter difference between each denomination, which between a 5 and a 10 is in that big, but between a 5 and a 50

is very big. So you get like four centimeters difference. Both number one and two relate to the third issue raised by Richard Smith and that's functionality. You can see whether you've got a five, a ten, a 20, or a 50 from the top of your wallet. Because the color and size differences. Number four, composition. It's a thin sheet of plastic. The polymer notes were developed primarily to combat counterfeiting. It feels like plastic that you can fold and scrunch up. You can actually put it through the washing machine

and it'll be fine. If you drop a note on the floor of a men's room, you don't really feel bad about picking it up and putting it under the faucet before you put it back in your pocket. These plastic notes cost more, but they last longer. They tend to last four times longer than fibrous paper notes. So you get notes in Australia that are 20 years old

and they pretty much just look the side. What Australia chooses to put on its currency is more in keeping with what Richard Smith of the dollar redesign project would like to see. It's much more inclusive and founding fathers and monuments, but it's hard to tell if these symbols are conveying much of anything to everyday Australians. They don't put statesmen on money frequently. There are artists and poets and I think there's some aboriginal leaders. If there's another thing to you could not pull prime ministers on our money. We don't have the reverence for prime ministers in Australia. But most Australians couldn't name the people that are on their money. I have absolutely no idea who is on any of our notes except for one side of the five dollar

note is the queen and that's just because I don't want her on there. I'd imagine if you asked any Australian if they know who is on their notes there would be less than one percent of people who could name anybody other than the queen. The symbolism in Australian cash seems to be tied more to the innovation of the bills themselves. There's a certain pride that polymer bills were developed in Australia and have been exported to the rest of the world. Australia now manufactures the polymer notes of nearly 20 other countries. It's a good business for them. The good design of the currency itself is the overriding brand.

It's no ordinary note, however. It's Australia's new problem at $10 note. And it was developed and printed right here. I would like to see American currency redesigned and treated more like a living piece of technology rather than an artifact. I think even the most jingoistic among us could concede that there are design innovations that could be incorporated into US currency

to make it better, but there are some interesting reasons why we probably won't. In a someone once told me that getting rid of the greenback would be like burning the flag on the steps of the capital. That's David Walton. My name is David Walton, my book is The End of Money. A lot of people are currency is a physical touchstone of our national identity. Some of this is emotional, but there is this other concern that is simultaneously tantalizing and scary, I think. And that other concern is that when you redesign the money, you remind people what currency

is and what gives the currency value. And of course, what gives the currency value is our belief that it's valuable and in the religious sense of it nothing more than faith or trust or worship whatever you want to call it makes a dollar worth a dollar or worth whatever you're going to buy with it. So that is upsetting to a lot of people and to maintain the aura of strength and stability of the United States economy. It probably helps to maintain these legacy features in the design of our money. Through what is now three or four generations,

we've had the same color, I think, since the Civil War. The portraits, the engraved styling, the filigree, the legacy features convey stability. In our currency, the currency on which all other currencies are hitched has to be stable. So not only do we not redesign the stuff, but we don't pull older notes from circulation either. So we'll have reissues and redesigns of our cash, but you can still use the last generation design as legal tender.

In other countries, a complete redesign deprecates the old design. You're given a grace period to use or exchange it, but after a certain date, the old currency is shredded by the central bank, and you can no longer spend any that you have left. This has never been the case in the US. You can even use an 18th century coin stamped with just the value of two cents to go buy something you might want to be careful because I could be so stupid. It could be worth $3,000 to a collector out there. But if you want to go spend it as two cents, you can. And again, this is part of creating this aura of super stability and inherent value of federal or reserve notes.

David woman is quick to point out that even though these concerns of instability have been cited when people bring up redesign in the money or eliminating the penny, he thinks it's pretty irrational and an overly cautious stance. It seems to me a little bit patronizing to think that Americans couldn't handle a dollar redesign. But really, who is going to push it forward? You know, if you're going to go to work in government, don't you almost buy definition and have some of that sense of patriotism and nationalism that would make you a little bit more inclined to

like the greenback as is and a little less inclined to, you know, let some RISD hot shots get after it. You know, let some Rizdi hot shots get after it. But still, primarily driven by anti-counterfeiting measures, US currency has been pushed to change in recent years, and most of these new disciplines are why it looks worse than ever. The legacy features remain largely intact, but a layer of modern fonts and swirls makes the bills look like they're busting at the seams. It's the worst of both worlds. You know, it's absolutely chaos. There's very little this elitum about our money from a design standpoint as far as I understand.

When I told David Woment about my new found discovery and appreciation of the Australian dollar as evangelized by Tristan and Tom. It was less than impressed. I don't think it's that remarkable. Congratulations to the Aussies and the scientists who came up with polymer banknotes. And I think they profited well because of that innovation. But I'm just not convinced it's a very world-changing kind of thing. It's pretty. Hey, I personally think pretty counts.

But from his point of view, a better design bank note, even a plastic one, is still just a piece of paper. I mean, his book is called The End of Money After All. The design efforts out there related to money that excite me more are the design for the user interface of apps for mobile money, right? How are we going to be transacting with money and PayPal, mobile at Google Wallet, and where our designers bring into their on those interfaces? Because the interface with paper or a polymer money, I get it already. And the truly interesting frontier of design is not going to be

design is not going to be the bank note art that the Swiss come up with in 2016. Right? It's going to be the interface with mobile apps and what designers are doing to make our interactions with money more fluid, more sophisticated, and possibly got for really even like, wiser. You know, who's designing the apps to make us a little more careful with our money and how are they bringing to their sort of the principles of design to make that happen?

And this is something that Tristan and Tom are totally on board with. Physical money is probably on its way out. And polymer money as cool as it is is a technology of its time. They themselves have actually designed clever user interfaces so that the good aspects of physical money are retained and transactions feel more tangible and more real even when it's just bits flying through the air.

So the physical US $20 bill will probably be gone from widespread use before it's a lovely shade of orangey red. I'm okay with that. Just as long as I have to see that wavy six-plag amusement park fond that says 20 USA in the background. I mean seriously, what the hell were they thinking? That fond is even cruel to Andrew Jackson, and that guy was a jerk. 99% of visible is now Sam Green's Man Katie Mingle, Avery Trollflin and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced at the offices of ArcSund. An architecture and an interior's firm

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