Two coun­tries will intro­duce the Euro as cur­rency on Jan­u­ary 1, 2008, Cyprus and Malta. The fronts of the coins look the same as that of all other coun­tries, while national sym­bols are dis­played on the back.

This reminded me of the occa­sion when I got asked by the Ger­man news mag­a­zine Der Spiegel, back in 1999, to design my own ver­sion of the yet to be intro­duced new Euro­pean coins. They also asked a few other design­ers whose solu­tions I can­not show as I have no data for them.

I noticed back then how lit­tle sys­tem­atic thought had gone into design­ing the new coins. While there were and still are three dif­fer­ent types of metal and sev­eral sep­a­rate sizes and bevels, It would be push­ing it to talk of a com­pre­hen­sive design sys­tem. Much worse, how­ever, is the fact that one still can only dis­tin­guish some of the coins by look­ing very closely – not a good idea for money that needs to be avail­able at  – dare I say it – the flick of a coin. One ought to be able to sort one’s change inside a pocket and count it even in the dark.

As you can see, the coins are all of slightly dif­fer­ent sizes, albeit not dif­fer­ent enough to dis­tin­guish by touch only. The 2-Euro piece has a diam­e­ter of 25.75 mm, the 50-Cent coin is hardly smaller at 24.25 mm, while, strangely, the 1 Euro is smaller than the one half its value, 23.25 mm. The 21.25 mm 5-Cent piece is also larger than the 10-Cent coin, which is worth more but only 19.75 mm in diam­e­ter. The dif­fer­ent met­als can only be told apart in good light.
The 20-Cent piece is the only one with a dif­fer­ent bevel, but still hardly dis­tin­guish­able from the 5-Cent piece of almost the same size. Embossed lines are to be found on the right and on the left or at an angle, but too thin and closely together as to offer any hints for prob­ing fin­gers. The out­line of Europe is more of a polit­i­cal state­ment than use­ful for identification.

The backs of the coins are look dif­fer­ent from coun­try to coun­try. That offers some inter­est­ing choices but doesn’t help keep dif­fer­ent nom­i­na­tions apart.

I first dis­tin­guished the groups: Ones, Twos and Fives.
The Ones, i. e. the 1-Euro coin, the 10 Cent and the 1 Cent piece, are sim­ply round and each one approx. 20% smaller than each other. If my Euro were 23.25 mm – as is the present one – then my 10 Cent would be 18.50 mm in diam­e­ter (about the size of the present 2-Cent piece) and 1 Cent would be 16.50 mm – instead of 16.25 now.

The Twos, that is 2 Euro, 20 Cent and 2 Cent, are octag­o­nal with very round cor­ners, mak­ing them dis­tin­guish­able in the hand. They are of the same diam­e­ter as the round coins, but appear a lit­tle larger and weigh heav­ier, while of the same thick­ness as the Ones.

The Fives are as round as the Ones, but a lit­tle thicker and with a hole in the mid­dle, like some Scan­di­na­vian coins have been for­ever. There is no 5-Euro coin as yet, but the sys­tem allows for it because it makes sense. The hole in the coin can be felt with the fin­gers and also looks quite distinct.

Apart from these dis­tinc­tions if shape and size, the nom­i­na­tion is also sym­bol­ized by hor­i­zon­tal lines, of which there are one, two and five (!) The three Euro coins are made from sil­verm the 50, 20, and 10 Cent pieces from “Nordic Gold” and the three small­est nom­i­na­tions are coined from cop­per, as they are now.

At first these coins may appear a lit­tle sparse and empty. The present design is another one of these com­pro­mise as with the design of the Euro ban­knotes. Noth­ing was to be rec­og­nized as a national sym­bol of any coun­try. The map of Europe is really quite con­tra­dic­tory in these cir­cum­stances. It is incor­rect gep­graph­i­cally, as Europe is not an island with clear con­tours. And it is polit­i­cally touchy as the map includes coun­tries that are not part of the Euro­pean Union. And where does Europe end? There are big chunks of land miss­ing in the north and the east, and the smaller Balearic islands have been sac­ri­ficed to small scale.
Clear fig­ures and let­ters are not only less ambiva­lent, but also help when count­ing. And I could always incor­po­rate Greek and Cyril­lic let­ters if required.

I’ll show my pro­pos­als for the backs of the coins some other time. For now, here are two ren­der­ings from my 1999 proposal.