Is it Time to Redesign the Dollar Bill?

April 22, 2010
Categories: Arts and Culture, People, USA and Canada
Tags:
by Joe Peach

This post is also available in: Chinese (Traditional)

Michael Tyznik, and many others, believe so.

As we all know, America is the land of the free and home of the brave, but it is also the birthplace of the form of capitalism that has prospered so massively in the modern Western world. So why is their cash so badly designed?

American notes start from the tiny denomination of $1. At the time of writing, that’s 65 British pennies, one Australian dollar and 7 cents, 74 euro cents, or 99 Canadian cents. None of these currencies start their notes at such low denominations (imagine a 65 pence note?), yet America continues to. There probably was a time when $1 dollar bought you a whole world of goods, but inflation stopped that pretty quickly and currency needs to evolve alongside its real value.

American notes are also all the same size and colour, meaning you have to rustle through every one to find the one you need. In any of the countries listed above, notes are distinguishable by size and colour, making them immediately recognisable, even when only a tiny a corner pokes out of your wallet. Heck, in Australia they’re even made out of an indestructible plastic-paper that survives a spin in the washing machine!

But back to Michael Tyznik. As part of the Dollar ReDe$ign Project he has redesigned every American note from $5 up, believing amounts below that denomination should be in coin form. Americans en masse can be a nationalistic bunch, which can result in a resistance to change. With this in mind, Michael has maintained the green of the notes, instead introducing a coloured holographic strip. In his words:

Money and the color green are inextricably intertwined in American culture. I think it’d be a mistake to remove green as the primary color. Instead, each bill has a brightly-colored holographic strip embedded into it which contains the denomination. The width of this strip also changes with the denomination. This introduces an element which makes each bill extremely easy to identify. There is also braille denoting the bills’ denomination on the holographic strip

So what do you think? Is Michael’s design, or any of the other designs featured on the Dollar ReDe$ign Project, enough to get America to catch up with the rest of the world and change their dollar bills?

Image courtesy of redjar on flickr

  • http://twitter.com/CrabOfDoom Chris DiMarino

    I have a problem already with this particular set of redesigns: the
    article makes a point of noting that currency in other countries is
    easily identifiable by color… and then proceeds to show two concept
    bills that have almost identical shades of pink at the top– the
    direction from which most people are looking at the bills that are in
    their wallets.

    I like that the bills have Braille, but why even bother making a case for the efficiency of
    color coding if you’re just going to negate its effectiveness in your
    own presentation? Even if the colored bars are different widths, how are such similar colors going to help anyone get used to which is which after a change-over? Make it helpful, or don’t make it a selling point. Having to pull the entire bill out of a wallet to check the whole strip for color is actually less efficient than flipping through the numbered corners we currently have, and those corners are visible no matter which end is up.

    And the US has tried using dollar coins before, most recently with the Susan B. Anthony and then the Sacajawea. The problem with them both is that the Treasury failed to make their sizes distinct from existing coins- specifically, quarters. Even the Sacajawea dollar’s gold tone didn’t stop people, both spenders and cashiers, from mistaking them for quarters and as a result overpaying or getting short-changed. A dollar coin would have to be markedly larger than a quarter, like the old Walking Liberty silver dollars, but then every vending machine in the country would need its coin slots replaced, which is likely why the attempts to re-popularize dollar coins were made so quarter-sized. Toll booths and public buses would need all of their coin sensors replaced. Same with parking meters, and bill acceptors, which would have to be widened for differently-sized paper. The vast majority of currently manufactured wallets would be obsolete, and a big loss of materials for anyone making them. Extensively altering currency takes more effort than just getting people to a bank to update their cash.

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