Every once in a while we as designers bump into a design that feels wrong. Dustin Curtis hated booking a flight with American Airlines’ website so he proposed a redesign. Tyler Thompson had enough with those ugly and confusing boarding passes so he challenged Delta.

Yesterday, a new $100 bill was introduced. It looked so bad that we were convinced that it’s some kind of a hoax. So we headed to the Department of Treasury website to check if it is.  

It wasn’t.

This really perplexed us. After all, this was an amazing opportunity to redesign one of the most widely used objects in our lives. What a waste. This is literally money down the drain.

It might be the case that this new redesign was intended to introduce some new features to the bill. Five of them are new security features that were added to the front side of the bill. One new visual aid was added to the back side of the bill. But why scarifies design?

Let’s talk about the back side. It looks as if the new visual aid feature was done with MS paint. No kidding. This new font out of nowhere. Those messed up proportions. Aaaaaah…. Take a look:

So we decided to take the challenge ourselves. We thought that it would be wise to have some constraints in place for the redesign:

• Use the same (or very similar) color theme as the original bill.
• Keep the visual aid feature.
• Keep the current content (Independence Hall image, “In god we trust” text).
• Embed current security features (small printed 100s).
• Don’t deviate too much from the current bill that is in use so people would be able to make associations.

We came up with a quick sketch for the new bill as we see it. The main goal was to make it as simple as possible:

We also think that the big 100 type should be made tactile for the visually impaired. Some degree of embossing would be able to achieve this effect.

Designers, we would love to see your versions for this new bill. Send us good stuff and we will post it.