Fugly five

The general consensus in the design community is that new U.S. five is ugly. The 2,500 at the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing got together and decided to grace our good bill with a giant purple Helvetica in the corner. And then around the same time the Royal Mint shows off their sexy new coins designed by a first time, 26-year old graphic designer named Matthew Dent. For people uninitiated into the design processes this doesn’t make any sense, but for most of us in the thick of it, it’s pretty clear. Designing by committee failed.

Now I don’t want to be too harsh on the fine folks at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, I’m sure they spent a lot of time working through ideas and it probably took them quite a while to get the design we see today. Obviously I don’t know all that went on, but my guess is the process they went through involved many designers, numerous committees and required the approval of at least four managers. Suggestions were made at each step in the process and eventually designers were left tweaking or just implementing the decisions of others higher up in the approval food chain. It’s been my experience that this process rarely works and this is just one such example.

The other issue where I see things went terribly wrong for our trusty five was with the idea of trying to modify an iconic design. I’m not particularly attached to our old currency but it’s been ubiquitous in my life and it’s a design I’ve come to know and trust. A five, is a five, is a five. Instead of respecting that legacy someone decided, alright, we need new currency for security reasons let’s start from scratch and make something new. No, they decided to go and tack on elements to a design, far after the fact. It’s far more difficult to do this. Adding to an existing design, especially one that isn’t your own, with a large team, is incredibly challenging. Just ask people working on internal teams at large organizations, making changes to a slew of websites.

In the end we’re left with Frankenstein’s monster: one that meets new security needs but is a poor imitation of the original. They should have just started fresh, or even gone with the contest model. Maybe then we would have ended up with something as hot as those Brits.