Bryan’s Blog

In an interesting twist, Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima hired 10,000 anonymous artists to recreate a small portion of the US$100 bill. The artists were each paid one US penny. Called Ten Thousand Cents (found via swissmiss), the project took advantage of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. None of the artists knew what they were helping to recreate and some decided to forego the replication and insert their own interesting designs.

The project is definitely worth a look, if nothing else than to see the flash file on the home page that draws each section simultaneously. There is also a section within the site that displays certain pieces, large-scale, as they are drawn.

The Ministry of Type has a small article about the new currency being deployed in the United Kingdom. (Found by way of Andy Rutledge.)

I don’t have much to say about it, aside from the fact that the coinage was developed through an open contest that received 4000 entries from 500 people. The winner? A 26-year-old graphic designer named Matthew Dent. (There’s a Times Online article about the competition available, too.) If that isn’t inspiration, I don’t know what is. The coins are beautiful to see and the shapes themselves make me wish I lived in Britain so I could spend these post-haste. Instead I live in a country that honestly believes one and two-dollar bills are acceptable. (Though I suppose we haven’t printed two-dollar bills in a number of years.)

The end of the linked article also has a link to a quip comparing the new coinage to the US reconfiguration of the five-dollar bill. It’s as obvious as the bureaucratic conglomeration it represents. Sad.

If you’re shopping early for my birthday, the Royal Mint offers some nice commemorative packages in affordable (and not so affordable) price ranges.