TOM BADLEY'S PORTFOLIO OF MONEY

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V22 2019 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 22, Number 32, August 11, 2019, Article 34

Here are some examples of banknote designer Tom Badley's work that caught my eye. As noted earlier, this was found via the Society of Paper Money Collectors' News & Notes August 6, 2019. -Editor

I ‘upgraded’ the original design of the UK’s best known alternative local currencies, the Brixton Pound. This design experiment came from talking to the designers of the Brixton Pound, who did everything they could to purposely reject the appearance of money, as an artistic and somewhat political statement – by rejecting the aesthetics of banknotes, the designers aimed to capture a spirit of revolution and ‘people power’. Thus, the Brixton Pound’s punk design is made of the bare minimum: numbers, portrait, text, and little else.

The aesthetics of banknotes have a vital function: they protect a currency from counterfeiting. None of the design features of a banknote are trivial, nor are they pompously decorative. The complexity of banknote design and hi-spec print processes allow the public to easily tell the difference between real and fake.

My ‘upgrade’ of the Brixton Pound features 3 colour intaglio, 4 colour rainbow offset, OVMI, security strip, microlettering, watermark, and continuous design.

The notes have a similar composition to the current Bank of England notes. The 3 notes are themed around different geometries: 5 – the Fibonacci sequence, 10 – fractal geometry, 20 – the hexagon.

A rough sketch of a forthcoming banknote design, featuring President Donald Trump has been released and circulated on social media. The note is scheduled for release in July, and pays homage to the President’s first 4 years in office.

The ‘Trump note’ will feature a hand-engraved portrait of the 45th President of the United States.

The Deplorables is a series of designs that honor popular figures who advocate principles of privacy, transparency, and truth – in particular, those associated with the revelation of secrets. The notes are denominated in the popular cryptocurrency Ethereum and have been specially produced as NFTs – Non-Fungible Tokens – digital assets on the blockchain with a prescribed scarcity. A physical version of these series is planned, while the NFT artwork is available on the Blockchain Art Exchange, in a limited edition of 20.

The next design in the Deplorables series, featuring Edward Snowden, available exclusively on the Blockchain Art Exchange.