Monday, February 21, 2011

cultural color study hw

Although I only lived there for a very short time, I'm originally from Toronoto, Canada. Most of my family still lives in Ontario, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn a little bit more about my home country. First I looked up the flag, which had no significant meaning (that I could find). I thought maybe the color red would be important because the mounties wear it and it is on the flag, but I actually came to the conclusion that maybe the use of the color red is a vestage of Canada's attachment to Britain.

Instead I decided to trace changes in Canadian Currency throughout the century. Think about how many times a day you see money, in your wallet, being exchanged on the street, how often do you think about money? What impact does the color of money have on your perception of it?

First, I grouped all denominations by year and then I regrouped like denominations together. In the first set, you get a color picture of the era the money was used. In the second set you can see the diversity of hues, the proportions of color used, and the changes in design. Something interesting that begins to show up in the last two batches of currency redesign is the incorporation of anti-forgery security measures including magic numbers and ultraviolet imagery. Something cool in the 1986 batch was a chip embedded in the upperleft corner for the visually impaired. The chip could be scanned and the denomination of money would be audibly spoken. Currency reissuing has become centered on technological advances to prevent forgeries.

2 comments:

  1. Great research! I also wonder why the colors they use EXUDE "this is MONEY- it has value". They never make money that is fruity or even beautifully colorful. It is almost ALL (worldwide) blue, red, brown, maybe some orange and that is IT! (and these are VERY similar hues all over the place!) WHY? Is it practical, dyes that last? Or psychological- we value these colors as they were the first colors that didn't fade?

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  2. Does the color have any correlation to the image/figure used in the design? Do Canadians identify the color of money first?...before the number or the image? What if you changed the red color bills to violet and the green color bills to blue? Would people notice or just keep exchanging the bills incorrectly?

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