Currency Redesign: Chinese Yuan
Project Overview:
I was tasked to craft a new currency design with the goal of telling a new, different story from an existing currency design.
Date/Duration:
Spring 2022
Client:
Class Project
Role:
Solo designer
Research, Inspiration and Ideation
To start, I researched two different countries that I found interesting. I chose Peru and China. I crafted the moldboards below based on research of each of the countries.
After peer review and feedback, I decided to proceed with redesigning the Chinese yuan. I researched what animals were endangered in China along with traditional patterns of Chinese painting and more on how to incorporate as much China's history and culture as possible onto the bills.
Here is an example of currency in China today. It depicts Mao Zedong and this particular bill uses red, but the different values of currency are differentiated by color.
I decided to take a nature-focused approach. I wanted to focus on animals native to China to move away from political imagery in my bill redesign. I then started to sketch animals native to China that I might want to use in my bills to get a feel for the project's subjects.
Exploration
I was then faced with the challenge of deciding what kind of graphic style I wanted to use on my bills. I explored pop, traditional, and a mix of the two in the three sketches below:
I then shifted my focus into applying these styles to bills themselves. I came up with two different ideas for bills as shown below:
I fell in love with the design of the top bill with the crane, and decided to proceed with the rest of my bills using that style. I settled on the panda, golden snub-nosed monkey, and the red-crowned crane as my Chinese animals to feature on the bills.
Final Product
I focused on the panda in the one yuan bill, and because pandas are often paired with their primary food source bamboo, I used a natural, plant-like green as the background color. The background of all the bills stays the same except varies in color, featuring the plum blossom on the back which is the national flower of China.
The fifty yuan bill features the golden snub-nosed monkey and uses blue as the main color. Chinese currency is differentiated by color on their existing bills, so I chose to follow that theme in my bills.
The one hundred yuan bill features the red-crowned crane and a red background. The name of the red-crowned crane makes it seem like royalty, so I chose to utilize that animal in the highest of the three values. Red is also the primary color in the Chinese flag and it further emphasizes the value of that color to the country. Below, I decode each of the elements in my bills in greater detail:
Reflections
This project focused a lot on the analysis and purpose behind certain design choices, particularly the reasoning behind currency designs. Because currency is something everyone uses, it is important for said currency to be easy to read and differentiable, but not easily counterfeited. Takeaways from this project revolve around cultural research and how to implement that into my future work. Researching reasoning and different visual culture from another country was quite inspiring to me and I hope to make that a big part of my practice in the future,
