One of the perks of spending some time abroad is that you get to be naive again. You are not accustomed to the design of what you interact with in daily life, so you see new things. I've had the opportunity and pleasure of spending two months at Northwestern University's Segal Design Institute and MMM-program. And for all the things I thoroughly enjoyed in the US, I must say, it was not the design of the coins and banknotes.

What confused me about US coins
First of all, looking at the coins (pictured above) you can see that it's not very clearly indicated what the denomination of the coins is. On most of them it is printed in quite a small typeface, and in the case of the 10 cent coin it doesn't even say that it's a ten cent coin. Just 'one dime', which basically is jargon to an ignorant foreigner like me. And then there's the size. The five cent coin is bigger than the 10 cent coin (but the material looks very similar). I guess it's because traditionally the value of a coin was inherent - it should actually be worth what it represented. Once again, no biggie if you've been using it for years, but for me - the naive Dutch guy - that was pretty confusing. Especially because in the line at the counter you don't usually have lots of time to start reviewing each coin. You'll get nasty looks from the people in line behind you.



The old Dutch Guilder coins
Now, here's a range of coins that's different: the coins of the old Dutch Guilder. Sorry for the slight hint of chauvinism here, but this is just the best example of functional coin design I know. They're obviously all designed using the same design language. The designer, Bruno Ninaber van Eyben, chose to communicate the denomination of the coins using their size, material, typography and a system of lines. Note that the 10 and 5 cent coins only have vertical lines, the guilder and the quarter have horizontal and vertical lines, and the 2,5 guilder coin (rijksdaalder) has vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines. I can't be sure, but I think a naive user would have less trouble with these coins than with the US coins.

US banknotes
In addition to being outsmarted by coins, there were banknotes to make my life harder. My gripe with US banknotes (but many bills all over the world have the same issue) is that they all have the same color. Basically in your wallet a stack of Dollar bills looks like this:



And those are actually 1, 10, 20 and 50 dollar bills in that picture. The only way to distinguish them properly is to read the denomination. Recently the five Dollar bill got a slight makeover, making the denomination easier to distinguish, but the overall color of the banknote remains the same. By the way, you don't have to be foreign to notice this issue. AmericanRichard Smith has started the The Dollar Redesign Project: anyone can submit their designs for a better Dollar.

Dutch banknotes of the guilder
But aren't most banknotes of the same generic color? Well, no. Take a look at these - again, I'm sorry - Dutch banknotes by Ootje Oxenaar, once heralded by the English visual design magazine Creative Review as the most beautiful money in the world.



But actually I'm not into them because of their beauty. I love the functional use of graphic design in these banknotes: because of their very distinguishable color scheme (and slightly different sizes), if you put them in a stack in your wallet, you get this:



And that makes it much easier to locate the right one. Now, the aforementioned Guilder coins and bills have of course been replaced by the Euro coins and banknotes. But thankfully the Euro bills and coins have the same properties that made the 'design of the Guilder' so appealing to me: differences in color and size, clear typography, and an overall design language. Though I should say I find the graphic design of the bills not particularly inspiring.

A lack of incentive
So why are there so many poorly designed banknotes around? These are products that are used by millions everyday. Why not make that usage a little easier? Well, I think first of all there is no incentive for the creator of the notes to implement a better design, as usage problems with bills don't cause product returns or customer complaints at the help desk, and people have no alternative. Users of the - let's just say - Australian Dollar will not suddenly turn to the Euro because the Austrialian Dollar could have been designed better. And there's lots of incentives to keep stick with an old design: tradition, nostalgia, etc. The design of the Dollar bills stems from the 1930s. That's a good deal of tradition, right there. And if you want to do it right you have to design and replace a whole range of coins or bills at once. That's quite the logistics operation. So in the end it probably all comes down to the motivation of a country's central bank.

More about Ootje Ooxenaar
> Transcript of lecture by Ootje Oxenaar on designing banknotes
> Interview with Ootje Oxenaar on YouTube