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The Dollar Redesigned

So Dowling Duncan just redesigned the dollar bill, with interesting results. I just came back from a trip to Copenhagen, and seeing these immediately reminded me of the Danish banknotes as well as the colorful, modern Euro banknotes. I like the colors, I like the vertical format, and I like the sizes a lot. A lot of the criticism I saw of this project is along the lines of “too simple, too easy to reproduce,” which is a silly dismissal, since making something graphically complicated doesn’t make it harder to print/scan at all. I’m also going to ignore the fact that Obama is featured on the $1, which seems like a bad decision.

Beyond that, the biggest issue is the fact that there is a big disconnect between the visual language and what the US represents as a nation. All the sans serif, all the solid bright colors are very trendy design wise, and I think it looks good, but I associate it with the International Style. It’s a representative of Europe and particularly Switzerland, not America. Somehow it fails at all reflect America as a nation, despite being littered with national symbols. And that’s a problem that needs to be solved.