[gb] Studio

“Honestly, anything is better than our new stuff with the pink and the huge heads, looking more and more generic by the day.”

Designers love to redesign. I should know, I’m one of them. But let me rant for a moment: Good designers can do an excellent job of taking a fresh approach to something. The best designers know when to clean the slate, and when not to.

I ran across the designs featured above in an article over at the ISO50 blog. I love these designs. They’re really fresh and they’re really fun. But it was the commentary that caught me: “…anything is better than our new stuff with the pink and the huge heads, looking more and more generic by the day.” Is that really true?

Don’t get me wrong, new designs are fun and sometimes very necessary, but the basic premise of the argument I always hear in the redesign of our money is this: “it’s boring compared to everyone else’s money.”

We have a currency design that is recognized world over… As a designer I need a much more compelling argument to simply abandon that.

These new designs (and many others I’ve seen submitted to the project) are good, but they make our money blend in with the rest of the worlds’. Sometimes a cornerstone of a brand is its recognizability. We have a currency design that is recognized world over. I don’t know if any other country can say that. As a designer I need a much more compelling argument to simply abandon that.

Sure, maybe the dollar needs a redesign or an update. But maybe we shouldn’t throw everything out and lose a bit of our identity as a nation. Give me a better argument.

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