24.11.08
Jack
A run on the pound
Since the value of the pound has been dominating the news, I wanted to write about a more positive note on the pound. Prime Minister Gordon Brown launched an outward attack on the Conservative Party after the party’s shadow Chancellor George Osborne warned that the collapse of sterling would be down to the government’s ambitious plans to spend its way out of the economic crisis.
The pound is expected to fall even further this week after hitting a 13 year low and losing over quarter of its value, which is now below $1.50 and at its weakest value ever against the euro. I thought a bit of PR for sterling was needed so let’s look at the new design which was chosen via an open competition and was widely advertised in the national media in August 2005. The competition was ran by the Royal Mint of the UK, it attracted around 4,000 entries but a young and aspiring designer, Matthew Dent, came up with a new, innovative design and contemporary treatment, which won through. His ideas were to be implemented on the backs of the one, two, five, ten, twenty and fifty pence pieces… a design that brings them all together.
His concept lends a more uniformed and intriguing idea to the brief, each coin with an oversized shield positioned attentively as the quarters of the shield. When all are placed together they represent England, Scotland, Ireland, and England again.
When you start to look at what hasn’t been included on the new coin, for example, the exclusion of Britannia from the 50 pence piece or no acknowledgment of the national symbols of Wales, one wonders the lasting effects that these omissions would cause. One thing is that in comparison with the new 5 Euro coin called “The Architecture Fiver” which was based on the subject “Netherlands and Architecture” and would be used within the Netherlands. The new pound coins have by far the best pound for pound (excuse the pun!) contemporary treatment than its euro counterpart. The new five Euro coin has a typographic mosaic of the Dutch Queen Beatrix with names of important Dutch architects while the back is designed as a book shelf.
The design process used for the five Euro coin is more technical than one used for the pound. A programmer, Gepostet von Stani, used custom software in Python within the SPE editor and for the visual power, he used PIL and pyCairo. All the developing and processing was done on GNU/Linux machines, which were running Ubuntu/Debian. This is an impressive stuff by our Dutch counterpart but I can’t help but feel a bit patriotic by siding with the new pound coins and declaring the graphic concept used as the winner of this duel.
