oh. my. god.

[solarbird]

The back of the new American ten dollar bill is hideous. I mean god damn, even by American money standards - some of the worst-designed money in the Western world - it's awful. It doesn't even look real, and not in that sense of "this doesn't look like money," but more in the sense of, "this looks like a bad video insert done by somebody who doesn't understand chroma key very well."

I cannot imagine who could have signed off on this thing. The only explanation I can imagine is that somewhere there are $10 bill changers that key off the old engraving on the back. I hope that's what happened. But that doesn't excuse the rest of it.

Because... damn. The more you look at it, the worse it gets. It's just wretched.



All it needs is a "$5 rebate!" sticker and a Microsoft logo to make it complete.

Comments

[brightbeak.livejournal.com]

we've gotten the official propaganda from the us mint at work, and actually, the specimen is a hideous representation...
and compared w/ some of the paper crud the us mint has come up with, at least this one is only mildly ugly!
;)

[darkphoenixrisn.livejournal.com]

We need to hire the people who design money for the EU.

[daspatrick.livejournal.com]

Although that thing is indeed hideous, I must disagree with you about american money in general . . . I think that our bills have a professional, business-like elegance about them that really defines how currency should look and feel -- especially opposed to the rainbow-colored play-money favored by most of the rest of the world. I like the dimensions of our bills as well -- longer and narrower, and each demonination is the same size. There's just no way to bundle euros together effectively.

[waysofseeing.livejournal.com]

If you're blind, there's no way to differentiate one American bill from another. That's not true of most other currencies, which use different sizes for different denominations.

If you're low-vision or wear glasses, as I do, that "rainbow-colored play-money" makes it far easier to grab the correct denomination of bill at a glance.

All you need to do is spend a few weeks in Australia or Canada and you will quickly realize how much our currency just sucks.

[daspatrick.livejournal.com]

Although your have good points about people with reduced vision, I think your assumption that my preference is based on inexperience with foreign currency is a little off-base -- I've used pounds, euros, canadian dollars, yen, and won, and based on my personal experience I still find the US currency's aesthetics far and away the best.

[solarbird]

Traditional American money has a certain classical charm; the limited colours, the old fashioned portraits, the sense of symmetry, an awareness of balance, and above all, a sense of restraint. All of these are good qualities.

More modern American currency is getting further and further away from that, and with each revision, loses that charm, but is not replaced in any way by, say, any elements of design. The result is craptasms like this: the worst money in the modern world.

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

Agreed exactly. Traditional American notes are extremely poorly designed (with respect to function) and horrible to use. Not really the fault of the original designers, I'm sure it was fine for its time - just that the design wasn't changed much for so long. But they definitely have a certain visual integrity.

If the new $10 bills really look like the specimen pic above then god damn, that's ugly.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that could be better.

I really like the front, though.

[janne.livejournal.com]

So why aren't all the little 10's in the same font? Most curious!

[solarbird]

They want one instance of that number in that easily-machine-readable font for automated handling.