Hey all!
I was having a little creative fun last night, and thought I'd take a stab at redesigning U.S. currency for visuals, safety features, accessibility, etc. My first attempts were posted last night in an open thread, and reprinted here:
And:
Higher res versions are available here and here.
Granted, these are pretty rough mockups, but you should get the idea of what I was thinking.
There were some good comments in the open thread about visual likes and dislikes, but there was also a question as to why we had to keep the people ON the bills the same (particularly Hamilton, though he was the first Secretary of the Treasury.)
Right now, the bills are as follows:
President on $1 bill: George Washington
President on $2 bill: Thomas Jefferson
President on $5 bill: Abraham Lincoln
Face on $10 bill: Alexander Hamilton
President on $20 bill: Andrew Jackson
President on $50 bill: U.S. Grant
Face on $100 bill: Benjamin Franklin
(On the no-longer-used bills, you have McKinley on the $500, Cleveland on the $1,000, Madison on the $5,000, Salmon Chase on the $10,000, and Woodrow Wilson on the $100,000. These bills haven't been in circulation since Nixon ordered the $100 be the largest bill, partly to combat organized crime, but theoretically we could reintroduce larger currencies, like most countries, now that bills have far more counterfeit prevention measures than they did mid-century.)
So, if we were redesigning currency from scratch, we could presumably mix up the people on the bills a bit. Based on historian and poll rankings, the only Presidents who ever rank in top ten lists in the past twenty-five years are:
George Washington
Abraham Lincoln
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Thomas Jefferson
James K. Polk
Theodore Roosevelt
Ronald Reagan
Harry S. Truman
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Andrew Jackson
Woodrow Wilson
John F. Kennedy
James Monroe
James Madison
We also can pull from more influential heroes from America's past, as we do now with Franklin on the $100, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, etc.
So... help me out. Who would you put on which bill? :)