OUGD406: Studio Brief 02 - Licence to Print Money (Acetate Printed Design)

Coming back to a previous blog post where I explored my ideas based around a 3D piece as opposed to a flat 2D piece, I thought about ideas that would work well with acetate. One of my ideas originally was to have a CMYK colour split design, with each separate colour being on a different sheet of acetate. This would result in the full design only being visible when viewed from directly front on, but would hopefully make for an interesting visual from other different angles.

Original Idea

Something else i wanted to incorporate was to this idea was textures/patterns, I think it's something that's already within a lot of bank notes and is what makes a big portion of them.

Potential Patterns

Given also that this piece would be 3D, I thought of maybe incorporating some 3D aspects such as typography would add to the overall aesthetic. Since I'd already decided to take a different approach to this brief, so rather than going for functionality incorporating security features etc and instead designing it purely as an exhibition piece. I thought I'd take it one step further and create a unique piece with somewhat of a silly take on it, hence the design above.

We all have different names that we refer to money, some of them being more silly/stupid than others but ultimately we all know what they mean. And so given this I wanted to incorporate something that could maybe relate to people more on a personal level, not like a picture of a landmark or famous person would being on a bank note. An idea I had following on from this was that although I've only incorporated 4 names for money, there could potentially be space for the same design to be released into circulation except with different names for money. So for example one year the design above is released and the next year they change the names up and release that design, and same again the year after etc.

The textures I had in mind would be linked in with this underlying concept of music, and the main reason I wanted to base my design around music was that music is something that is universally appreciated, again bringing the note bank down to a personal level.

Initial Computer Sketch

Rather than going for a conventional typeface to use within my design, I figured that the design is already somewhat playful and personal, that I would draw out the design by hand but in a playful way.



As much as I wanted to incorporate several patterns to into my design, this design felt overcomplicated and not very aesthetically pleasing, which could possibly be down to too many colours being used.

2 Final Proposed Designs

I stripped down my design into just the four colours Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black to simplify it in the hope to make the design flow better. I also felt that up until now the designs had too many focal points and so I resized some parts to ensure that the key feature (the writing) was prominent.





I spoke to a couple of peers and asked which they preferred and why. The majority vote went to the second design as it felt less crowded and more harmonious with the background pattern tying everything in together.