“The world, of course, remembers the monster. When you look closely, there’s more to a tale…”
My wife is a costume designer, (and an excellent one, currently represented by Sarah Putt associates), and when we were in our 20’s, during the period when we attended lots of weddings (as opposed to the period after, when we attended lots of christenings, and now, when we attend parent’s evenings), we found that we often played down our respective jobs during conversations.
It’s a thoroughly self aggrandising thing to say, but we found that once you were asked ‘What do you do?”, and you replied “I’m a costume designer"/ Chief Engraver”, the conversation tended to stop moving, and we’d be peppered with questions at the expense of other people round the table. We’d play down our jobs, just so we could talk about other stuff.
The thing is, as soon as you tell anyone that you are a designer of coins, they inevitably come back with a story of some sort. Everyone either owns a coin, or knows someone who owns a coin, to which an interesting story is attached.
On my last day at the Royal Mint, I circulated a film clip via internal email. An impotent rebellious act, for sure, but I was proud of my contribution to the Mint’s fortunes, and sad to see design suffering what I considered an existential crisis.
This scene, to me, epitomises what coins represent.
They’re markers of history - either as commemorative pieces that are kept pristine and treasured, or as circulating pieces that show the dings and nicks of their journeys through society.
I have a pot full of old pennies that my dad collected (there’s the start of a story right there), dating back to about 1860. I’ve sorted some of them into dates, and picked out a historical event that occured in the year of manufacture of each one. I have one from 1888 (Jack the Ripper), and several from 1913 and 1919 (it’s the gap that makes these ones interesting). On the occasions where I’ve taken them in to students or schools, it’s always a conversation starter to say, “Do you know that when the coin you are holding was being made, X was happening……?”.
Incidentally, there’s a penny in my dad’s collection dated 1972 - the year I was born. I can just see him finding it in his change after buying nappies, and putting it to one side.
Yesterday I attended a webinar on Artificial Intelligence in the future of minting, and came away unsettled and frustrated.
To be clear, I am in no way a Luddite. I learned engraving in wax, Plaster of Paris and copper, but I work fully digitally now. I use AI a lot - either to streamline, or to upset my processes, depending on what I need. I’m a big believer in using whatever tools do the job best, and also in constantly moving forward.
What I’m not, is a believer in design as a purely decorative function. Sure, not every project needs deep symbolism. Horses for courses and all that; but yesterday’s webinar pitched AI as a convenient and, more importantly, an enclosed way of creating design from a brief (the brief, I should add, was also AI generated).
Granted, there was an amendment that AI doesn’t replace designers, and that there should be a human to “give things the once over”, but there’s a transactional analysis issue here. The message might be that Generative AI is a tool, but too many people are hearing that it’s a replacement. Conversations are already happening in marketing or sales departments about using AI to generate coins designs at client meetings. To be fair on AI, these conversations have been happening ever since my days at the Royal Mint, it was just the technology that was missing…
There’s some practical issues with creating coin design via AI - it’s very much impressionist in style. Images look polished and fully realised at first glance, but don’t always make physical sense. This is a real issue with coins, where designs have to be translated into a defined physical form. I usually have to re-draught designs that I receive from AI, as they simply don’t work as bas-reliefs.
There is a considerable skill in being able to translate a 2D design into bas-relief, even more so when that bas-relief must conform to production, timescale and budget limitations. Yet even more so when that design needs to tell a story - to take a brief and develop a visual language that shines through despite commercial constraints.
There’s also an ongoing grey area regarding copyright. Coin designers have, for years, flown under the radar with regard to taking existing imagery and translating it into relief. Need a lion for that design? Grab one from the internet and by the time it’s sculpted into relief, nobody will know the difference.
This approach is quickly running out of road. In 2022, Stejpan Pranjkovic withdrew his winning entry in a Croatian Euro coin design competition after a Iain Leach, a Scottish photographer, claimed copyright infringement over the image used on the coin.
Stejpan Pranjkovic’s coin design, and the original photo by Iain Leach.
AI models are, by their nature, trained on data drawn from the internet. Whilst generated images are, in themselves, arguably unique, there are still unanswered questions and pending legislation regarding the use of copyrighted imagery as source material, not to mention the moral issue of using images directly resourced from copyrighted material without the agreement (or knowledge) of the original artists.
Coins are, at their core, articles of trust and shared value. What does it say about us if we are happy to take the work of others, and strip it of it’s intellectual narrative for our own profit?
My years at the Royal Mint have given me an understanding of both the creative and the commercial side of minting, and this is a space that I have occupied as a freelancer for the last 13 years.
It’s an irony that in my last years at the Mint, my brief was always “Do it faster, do it cheaper”, yet it was only once I left that institution that I was able to operate flexibly enough to make that a reality. AI is definitely a part of that flexibility, but it’s a tool that I use to help me deliver the creative narratives that make coins interesting whilst meeting my client’s commercial constraints.
Yesterday’s webinar promoted a scenario where AI composed a homogenous brief, distilled that into an impractical visual that carried no spinnable narrative, and then deployed a bot to sell that product to a customer seeking a gift with personal connection. A comment was made about all art and design being derivative. If the pool of information that trains AI is already derivative, then the output is also derivative, and circles inwards.
In last week’s post, I referenced a WW1 coin series that my team produced at the Mint, and a rough video that I made, selling the concept. I played the video to our management team and to our outbound sales team, to help them ‘feel’ the series, and the designs behind it.
To my mint colleagues attending yesterday’s webinar- watch the video in the blog post, think about a salesperson discussing that with a customer, then think about the AI bot responding to Aditya’s phone call. In which scenario would you be happier handing over your money?
In the year between leaving the Royal Mint and going freelance, I worked for a London based consultancy called GDR Creative Intelligence. We dealt with trend forecasting in the retail sector, supplying tech and social media innovation to clients such as Louis Vuitton, Intel, Gap, Build-a-Bear, McDonalds, Coca Cola, and Crown Estates to name but a few. I always loved the contrast between Louis Vuitton’s ‘Continental’ (if you’re a John Wick fan) offices, and the cheese-nightmare of Build-a-Bear’s HQ in Ohio, where I had to present on a stage flanked by two 10 foot fibreglass bear guards.
One could be forgiven for questioning what transferable skills a coin designer and engraver could bring to retail innovation, but I landed the job on a single skill - storytelling. I had spent 15 years learning to tell stories through design, and at its core, retail is about narratives - drawing customers in with stories that connect them to your brand and your product. Retail is still about narratives. Connection is more vital as customers keep close hold of their money.
Design is an intellectual process central to the visual language of products, packaging and marketing. Visual decoration is the end point of this process, not, as AI proponents would suggest, the starting point. However, this does not resign mints to suffer expensive and opaque naval gazing at the hands of designers. Design can be responsive and commercial and still prioritise evocative and engaging narratives. I should know, I’ve made a 30 year career out of it.
I tail off this post with my favourite example of human design thinking at work…
If there’s value to you in good narrative design, get in touch as summer is filling fast.