When Being the Best is the Only Option

At the HSP Conference in Brazil, the new banknotes of Curaçao and Sint Maarten were voted the region’s best. We spoke with Sara Trygg Rudberg, Head of Design for Crane Currency about the new banknotes that her team and she designed.

What was it like designing the new Caribbean guilder?

Designing for an entire series is always fun, but this was special. This is a new currency, and for a central bank, in this case the Central Bank Curaçao and Sint Maarten (CBCS), and for us, it’s a larger project than designing for a new series. When designing for a new currency, every element is important.

How do you mean?

Look back over the past 25 years, only a handful of new currencies have been created. One of these was the euro, and while it may seem strange to compare the two, there are parallels: a shared central bank; a monetary union; the complexity and timing of launching a new currency while removing the previous series, and the huge task of informing the public. The CBCS appreciated this and leaned heavily into the process.

How did you become involved in the project?

Crane was one of the few bidders that could provide CBCS with as much as possible an all-inclusive experience of design, paper, novel security features and print. Bids were evaluated across criteria common in the industry, e.g., quality of design, security, cost, etc., but one criterion stood out, that was the supplier’s likelihood of being an adequate “sparring partner” with the CBCS.

Why do you feel that was so important?

In retrospect, it described how all aspects of the project were to be managed holistically from the timing of the design completion to production, our coordination with coin supplier, the Royal Canadian Mint, and our extensive involvement in the CBCS communication plan. We worked as true partners, with fluid, energetic collaboration. When the new banknotes and coins were revealed last year, I was joined at the event by our Marketing Manager, Mari-Anne Snäll, the CBCS point of contact for its communications plan. That underscored the importance placed on engaging the public and our collaboration across all parts of this multi-year project.

What part of designing the banknotes did you enjoy the most?

The Crane Design Team created a truly modern banknote. Leveraging a great theme (the undersea world), and the bountiful and beautiful fauna and flora of the Caribbean, we designed and integrated MOTION SURFACE® stripes into the full series which we printed on the durable cotton paper ENDURANCE®. The fronts were in a traditional landscape format, while the reverse were in a vertical format. There we integrated a RAPID HD Detect security thread with a moving wave pattern. We wanted to provide the banknotes with a security thread valuable to both the public and machines, and from a design perspective RAPID® Detect is vastly superior to magnetics. Magnetic material is dark, visible to counterfeiters and easily simulated. Of course, seeing how well received the banknotes are by the public and our industry, that has also been wonderful.