99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-54- The Colour of Money

Episode Date: May 17, 2012

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

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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, it's point of view. I don't know, that's tough because it is a little bit subjective, but... But it's horrible. There's like eight fonts on this thing. Typographically, graphically, symbolically. If it had 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 whorliness. But I think the primary tension embodied in the design of the green back 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 chain team 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 at 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 So it's awkwardness from a design point of view has kind of been superseded by its symbolicness.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 and 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. A way that the American currency all one size has 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's 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 design 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-re-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 U.S. 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, who are from briefly at the top of the show, are user center designers. And they run a blog and 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 fact is 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, which in some ways is 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, colloquial names, whether 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 $50 note, which is a sort of a green and yellow color and calling it a piney, which is short for a pineapple. It's all about the piney. 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 five and a 10 is in that big, but between a five 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 10, a 20, or a 50 from the top of your wallet. Because of 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 Fibres paper notes.

So you get notes in Australia that are 20 years old and I pretty much just looked aside. 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 are some Aboriginal leaders. If there's another thing to,

you could not put 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 $5 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 1% 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. Australian 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 polymer, $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. You know, 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 Walnut. My name is David Walnut. 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 wanna 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 order of strength and stability

of the United States economy. It probably helps to maintain these legacy features and 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 and 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 wanna 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 Womens is quick to point out that

even though these concerns of instability have been cited when people bring up redesigning 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 gonna go to work in government,

don't you almost by definition 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, uh, you know, let some RISD 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 it. When I told David Woman about my new found discovery and appreciation of the Australian dollar as evangelized by Tristan and Tom, he was less than impressed.

I don't think it's that remarkable. Congratulations to the Aussies and the scientists who came up with polymer magnets. And I think they prof 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 banknote, 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 what are designers bringing to bear on those interfaces? Because the interface with paper or Polymer money is I get it already and the truly interesting frontier of 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 forbid even like wiser. You know who's 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 don't have to see that wavy 6-plag amusement park font that says 20 USA in the background. I mean seriously, what the hell were they thinking? That font is even cruel to Andrew Jackson, and that guy was a jerk. 99% invisible was produced this week by me Roman Mars with special thanks to Tristan Cook and Tom Nelson of the blog Humans in Design. We'll have a link on the website. We are a project of KALW 99.7 local public radio in San Francisco and the American Institute

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