Remarks at BerkShares Benefit Event,
September 20, 2006
by John Isaacs of John Isaacs Design
“First off, I think BerkShares did a marvelous job of choosing images. Each one is beautiful. The selection was sufficiently variegated to ensure a distinct look for each denomination, and yet had a consistency of tone and character that provided the opportunity for design continuity throughout the series.
In approaching the design task, the first thing I eliminated was any attempt to emulate the design of federal currency, which, in my view anyway, is among the most conservative and least imaginative in the world, however hard the Federal Reserve tries to tweak it into modernity.
So my initial research focused on foreign currency, particularly the Euro, which is a beautifully designed series that panders to neither tradition nor fashion, and that I’m sure took millions of francs, guilders, marks, and schillings, and quite a few years to develop. I, on the other hand, had about three weeks from the outset to get final files to the printer. So I wasn’t about to try to match the design intricacy of the Euro, but it did serve as a basic inspiration for the series—and that meant, first and foremost, clear, modern typography.
While I was determined to avoid the aesthetics of federal currency, I didn’t want to make BerkShares feel too foreign either. So the BerkShares concept does to a considerable extent bring together many of the basic elements found on dollar bills. I first laid these out in the “five BerkShares” denomination: on the front, blocks of graded color behind the portrait and around the background image, simple diagonal hatching with complex color shades, a mix of reversed and colored type, and a variety of emblems and messages; and on the reverse a broad landscape, on which I superimposed a feint inverse of the front portrait. Finally, I embellished the design with lines of miniature motifs that resonated with each portrait, in this case an antique graphic of a beehive, which I felt was relevant to DuBois’s social achievements.”
