In 2005 The Royal Mint announced a competition to design six of the eight kinds of coin in circulation in Britain, the first full redesign of the coins since decimalisation in 1971. Open to everyone and with a top prize of £30,000, they received 4000 designs from 500 people, and I just saw on the news that the final designs have been completed and the first coins ready for issue. Not only that, but the £1 coin is now included in the redesign, and somewhat appropriately becomes the uniting element of the set.

You can tell they were done by a graphic designer; even with the complexity of the Royal Arms, the designs are clean and sparse, with pleasing variation in placement of the inscription, and on the 20p there is a sense of refraction through the thick border of the coin. Just take a look at them though, they’re fantastic, in fact, they’re astounding — I can hardly believe that these are actually official coins of the real United Kingdom, instead they look like they’re from some sleek, efficient, science-fiction alternate-universe version of the country.

The one thing that gives me pause in the whole process is the thought that we won’t be seeing any more of the beautiful 50 pence designs. I’m not exactly a numismatist but I do enjoy seeing the new designs every couple of years or so. I suspect that the one coin not included, the £2, will continue to have commemorative designs on it. I wonder when we’ll get a £5 coin actually in circulation?

While researching this article, I was looking through earlier coin designs on the Royal Mint site, and I notice the 1948 Half Crown used the Royal Arms as well, but with a more elaborate shield design. I think it’s rather attractive, and I’m intrigued by the crowned GG ligature either side of the shield.

UPDATE: Daring Fireball linked to this amusing comparison between the new coin designs and the new design of the US five dollar bill.

I’m fascinated by imaginary products created for films and games — there’s an art to creating something just similar enough to real products to be recognisable as a brand type, but without actually copying any particular identity. Some films and games come very close to existing brands (RUF in Children of Men; GAP for pets, Tube in GTA 3; Subway) while others work within the conventions of a product type so you know what kind of thing it’s supposed to be (pretty much everything in the Truman Show). I have an article I’m writing on brand conventions, but that’s not for today. The reason for this post is some of the work featured in this interview with Sarah Bradley, graphic designer and typographer at Pixar, and ex-lead title designer at Disney. In the article is a matrix for a box of rat poison shown in Ratatouille, which I just had to make into a fake box shot — I do this a lot at work and it’s fun to do, so I couldn’t resist.

The original matrix:

I remember as a kid finding a load of little glass bottles buried among some building waste in the garden. I’m not sure where they came from or what they were for, but I know one still had a bit of cork stuck in its top, and each one had a different shape embossed into the front. I was fascinated with them, and what they could have been for — clearly nothing environmentally persistent, nothing toxic anyway. I washed them out and kept them for a while, eventually losing track of them in the whole growing-up thing. So, when I came across this collection of perfumes (via Non 2) I had quite a nostalgic moment. It’s an oft-remarked phenomenon that things that are individually uninteresting or unremarkable gain a special significance and appeal when collected together. A scan of a coffee stain on paper is nothing special, but scan a whole load of coffee stains in and upload them to Flickr, hey presto! It’s interesting!

I just came across this site, The Dieline, which claims to be “The Web’s Leading Packaging Design Blog”. There are some very nice things on there indeed, including these wine labels. I must admit to being rather heavily influenced by the labels on wine — if I like the label, generally I think I’ll like the wine, and oddly enough it’s been quite successful in the past. Is that so wrong? After all, I’m not alone (same site, another nice wine label). So, having said that, I think I would definitely like to try this:

I’ve had this page of manhole covers open in the browser for the past few days, one of those things in the should-look-at-more-closely category. I’ve had a better look now, and I was reminded of seeing Japanese manhole covers, and they come in a much greater variety of designs (and colours!), so I was wondering why manhole covers are often so dull. I watched a How it’s Made on manhole covers the other day, and there’s no real reason why a city, region or département (say) shouldn’t have its own design.

This site has a good collection of images of Japanese manhole covers, four of which I’ve cut out below.

Font Constructor claims to be “a standalone mac only application to build fonts in an intuitive way”. It certainly looks interesting, but I was mostly taken by the look of the lowercase ‘g’ on the example it shows. Very nice indeed:

Been meaning to post this for a little while, I think I found it via Design Observer, these simple t-shirts each bearing a sample of a great typeface. I think they’re a nice idea, but I’m a little disappointed that they don’t have designs that reflect the character of each face more, instead opting for name-of-face-in-a-box. Printing restrictions, I assume.

Still, they’re nice, if too small for me. Go and look.