Design Kompany | Brand Marketing by Graphic Design studio in Seattle

Just got word the new designs for the Royal Mint’s coinage have been unveiled!

London-based graphic designer Matthew Dent, pictured here, designed the winning artwork for the new British coins.

Here’s what the shiny new coins will look like…

They fit together quite interestingly to imply a Royal Shield:

Here’s what Dent says about his idea:

I found the idea that members of the public could interact with the coins the most exciting aspect of this concept.

It’s easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar—being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them.’ -Matthew Dent

Why have the designs changed?

The reverses of seven coins have been redesigned to renew and reinvigorate the United Kingdom’s coinage because it has been almost 40 years since most of the standard designs currently in use were introduced.

This is an unusually long period of time for a series of coins to remain unchanged and you would need to go back as far as 1887 to find a series of reverses which has lasted as long.

While the current designs have served their purpose well, it is hoped that the new series will better reflect contemporary Britain. —The Royal Mint FAQ page

Nice to see even the people tied to the oldest establishment of all—currency—are open to a modern facelift. And even asymmetry. Amazing.

See full story at: TheRoyalMint.com/NewDesigns
Also see: DK’s coin collage, ‘Coins and Bindis’

A note about the Euro

Design Kompany was situated in West Cork, Ireland, at the time of the Euro transfer at the very end of 2001. People were supposed to turn in all of their Irish pounds and exchange them for the fresh and colorful new Euros. Which were also very modern, compared to the Irish stuff. Banks didn’t know what to do when all these older folks brought in jars with wadded rolls of money out from under their floorboards.

I have to admit I missed seeing the Irish coins and paper money around. Even when they didn’t accept it at places like Tokyo Narita airport I felt a kinship with the currency that belonged to a place I felt tied to, even as an immigrant there.

How many Americans experience what it’s like to be an immigrant? Well, but that’s a topic for another post. Suffice to say, I enjoyed the mix of cultures and personalities carrying lots of kinds of currencies overseas implied. Some pounds Irish, some British quid, a backpocket stuffed with Indian rupees.

Still, I’ve written my bit about how the world changes and we have to adapt, and I’ve also written about how a lecture at UW reminded me to keep our awareness up of the beauty of cultural diversity in America. After that one, Design Kompany checked out an Osamu Tezuka manga —in Japanese—and we’re reading it one scene at a time.

Also see:
DK’s post on Foreign Language and the Concept of Other
DK’s writeup on Mandelbrot: ‘The idea that perfection is a cube is over

Aside: My favorite story about the Euro

I have to tell you this really quickly.

There was this guy named Martin —. For the life of me I can’t remember his last name. About a dozen of us were gathered for Pat Boran’s creative writing workshop in Bantry, part of the Fish Publishing West Cork Literary Festival out there (Hi C and J!). After a long day of talking about very heady things that nobody really understood—(anyone else out there been to a creative writing workshop?)—we all headed to the pub. Naturally.

Where there happened to be an open mic session. Naturally. This was Ireland, after all.

Pat Boran was going to read a prizewinning poem but he didn’t because there were a lot of Goth kids there and it was really cozy and storytelling was more apt than some big poem with what I like to call “expensive” words. Context is everything.

Anyways, so he gets someone to pass over a guitar and does this nice little piece and tells us that he used to busk and stuff and it’s like that scene in Once.

So we’re all having a really nice cozy time with our pints and suddenly Martin — gets up to give us a poem.

Later I ran into him in line for an event at the Bantry Hotel and said Hey, I remember you! You’re the Euro guy! Here were the lines:

We’re changing to the Euro
We’re all going to die