Jonathan Franzen Thinks The $10 Bill Should Look Like This

The Guardian invited a klatch of cultural luminaries to redesign the British pound to reflect their own preoccupations. Some ain’t bad (but most are horrible).

If you think of "the ultimate design project" as one that rethinks something that we encounter hundreds of times a day, redesigning money would certainly qualify. Legal tender has to be durable, un-copyable, easy to handle and store, and on top of that it has to be a unique and effective piece of branding for the issuing nation itself. It’s enough to make the most talented professional designer blanch. But that didn’t stop The Guardian from inviting 18 writers, artists, and designers to try their hand at it.

Franzen’s discounted $10 bill, which is worth just $6.66, is meant to show the unaccounted environmental costs of consumption.

The point of The Guardian's exercise, of course, wasn’t to solicit actual workable designs--it was to get these culturati to create visual essays on their respective preoccupations regarding capitalism. As such, many of the results are just plain boring, like Naomi Klein and Kyo Maclear’s "hole earth note," which is just a piece of paper with a hole in it surrounded by gloppy platitudes set in some truly awful type. And the winner of the Occupy Movement’s protest currency competition, while fun and slick-looking, isn’t going to wow anyone with its graphic originality. (A top-hatted fat cat stuffing greenbacks into his 19th-century suit? I’ve never thought of "the 1%" that way!)

But some of the designs surprised us. Jonathan Franzen remixed the classic 10-dollar bill into a sleek, cutting critique of the hidden costs of species extinction. (Did you audit some design classes in between books, Jonathan?) Peter Carey simply submitted a "printable Kool-Aid coupon," a deft example of thinly veiled sarcasm if there ever was one. (We’ve gotta stop drinking the… Okay, you get it.) Margaret Atwood turned a banknote into cheekily self-serving advertisement for her book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Money’s all about looking out for number one, right?

An anti-capitalist statement from left stalwart Noami Klein, working with Kyo Maclear.
Bad boy writer Will Self teamed up with illustrator Martin Rowson to create a nightmarish series of scribbles.

But John Lancester’s entry was the only one to non-ironically engage with the aesthetics of currency, as well as its innovative utility. "'Money is, by general consent, one of humanity’s most remarkable inventions," he writes. "Because it makes all goods interchangable… it makes all human goods soluble and fungible and interchangeable. That’s what is wonderful about money, and what is terrible too… Britain is the only country in the world that had money for a long period, under the Romans--and then stopped using it, for many centuries. It’s as if we said, ‘Money? Well, it’s alright, but it’s not really worth the faff, is it?’ When we did go back to using it, it was in the form of the Anglo-Saxon coins which are still, to me, the most physically appealing money this country has ever had." After all, if you’re encountering money every single day of your life, it might as well be appealing.

John Gray put endangered animals on his entry, "to remind users of the loss of natural wealth that no amount of money can replace."

[Image: topseller/Shutterstock]