Money Note Assignment:

 

The country I chose out of the hat was Argentina, and I wanted to create a banknote that wouldn’t hold cliché elements to it, and blend the text and imagery together nicely.

 

Instead of just the popular landmarks and animals, I wanted to research further into Argentina and find information that wouldn’t be as known to others. The most interesting piece of information I found was that fingerprint analysis during solving crimes was first done in Argentina, so this was something I really wanted to include in the final design. Other bits of researched material that I included in my final design were the:

- National Hornero bird

- Argentina’s logo

- Argentina’s Motto of “En Union y Libertad” Spanish for “In unity and freedom”

- Two popular landmarks that were Mount Fitz Roy and Train to the Clouds of Salta

- Julio Argentino Roca – Famous person of Argentina

- Signatures of the President and Vice President of Argentina.

 

The colours of the Argentinian flag are pastel blue and yellow, however while playing with these colours I believed that they looked very flat. Therefore I chose to experiment with other colour combinations and finally decided with purple, pink and blue. I believe these colours harmonize well together, and because of all the different tones the note doesn’t look visually flat.

 

In terms of security elements I chose to use more technical skills on Photoshop. Firstly the entire background consists of many different directional lines blended together, including simple vertical lines, arrows with different lines and multiple small hexagons with again different lines going in different directions. These made a good texture throughout the design. Also every image used in the note has been individually engraved, which was quite difficult to pull off well as a lot of trial and error was required for each particular image in terms of threshold levels and line thicknesses.  Lastly I played with the blend tools and opacity to simulate watermarks of elements including the logo, fingerprint, slogan and of Julio Roca. Serial numbers and signatures were also added, as these are visible in every standard banknote. Finally the typeface itself has been made to look engraved for security purposes and well as design.