How a Banknote Is Designed: From Brief to Press (and Who the Designers Are)

Last updated: September 2026

Who actually designs banknotes?

Usually a team inside the central bank or its printing works, occasionally a named individual who won a competition. The Oesterreichische Nationalbank credits the design of the euro banknotes to Robert Kalina, a graphic designer at Oesterreichische Banknoten- und Sicherheitsdruck GmbH in Vienna. Most other issuers publish the design concept and leave the individuals uncredited.

That anonymity is deliberate rather than accidental. A banknote design is a negotiated document: the security team decides which features must appear and where, the cash-handling specialists decide what a sorting machine has to be able to read, accessibility advisers decide what a blind user has to be able to identify by touch, and the visual content has to survive all of it. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing describes its own arrangement in exactly those terms, with banknote designers developing the overall look, layout and artistic details and then working closely with engravers who cut the portrait, vignette, ornamentation and lettering (Bureau of Engraving and Printing). Our guide to intaglio printing and banknote engraving follows the design into the engraver's hands.

Hungary is the other issuer that names its designer outright. The Magyar Nemzeti Bank records that the graphic design of the renewed forint banknote series was created by graphic designer György Pálinkás, that the banknote paper is made at Diósgyőr Paper Mill Limited, and that the notes are printed by Hungarian Banknote Printing Shareholding Company (Magyar Nemzeti Bank). Publishing the whole chain, designer, mill and printer, is unusual and worth noting when so much of the industry treats those relationships as confidential.

Kalina's euro remains the clearest example of a single designer's language surviving intact. The Oesterreichische Nationalbank sets out the concept: seven denominations, each in a different colour and size, all built on the shared theme of ages and styles in Europe, with windows and gateways on the front symbolising openness and cooperation, the twelve stars of the European Union standing for dynamism and harmony, and bridges on the back representing the connection between the peoples of Europe and between Europe and the wider world (Oesterreichische Nationalbank).

What is in a central bank's design brief?

Security first, then function, then meaning. The Bank of Canada is one of the few central banks to publish its principles in full, and the order it lists them in is the order they bind: security, functionality and recognisability, accessibility, official languages, reflecting the country, and broad appeal.

The Bank's own wording is worth reading closely because it inverts the assumption that a note starts as a picture. It states that security is the most important factor when designing a note, and that visual content must support the chosen security elements even if robust security features impose limits on the design (Bank of Canada). The picture serves the security features, not the other way round.

Functionality and recognisability

Notes have to work in automated banking machines and other cash-handling equipment, and they have to be recognisable as that country's money and readily accepted. The Bank notes that certain visual elements are deliberately carried from one series to the next to support those goals. This is why a redesigned note is rarely unrecognisable: continuity is a design requirement, not a failure of nerve.

Accessibility

The brief commits the Bank to giving blind and partially sighted Canadians an effective suite of features so they can identify denominations. Different issuers solve this differently. Canada keeps every denomination the same size and adds a tactile feature. The euro area and the United Kingdom step the size up with the value. The Bank of England states the rule plainly on its note pages: the higher the value of a note, the larger it is (Bank of England). Our banknote sizes chart shows which countries took which approach.

Official languages and national content

Under the Bank of Canada Act, notes are printed in both English and French. The content principle is broader: a new note is described as a unique opportunity to represent Canada, with each new note depicting new visual content so that over time the diversity of Canadian society, culture and achievements is celebrated. Notes should promote the country and its people, use clearly identifiable symbols, be meaningful today and for years to come, and evoke pride and confidence.

How is the theme and the subject chosen?

A series usually gets a single theme first, and the individual subjects are chosen inside it. Norway picked the sea. Switzerland picked the many facets of Switzerland and abandoned portraits altogether. Australia gave every denomination a wattle species and a native bird. The theme is what makes a series cohere across denominations issued years apart.

Norges Bank documented its own reasoning at unusual length. Its film series on the making of Norway's banknotes devotes separate chapters to why new banknotes were needed at all, why the sea was chosen as the theme, what lay behind the choice of motifs, and what it calls the long road from design proposals to actual banknotes (Norges Bank, published 22 November 2016). The bank is equally direct about the trigger: advances in technology have given counterfeiters better methods, neighbouring countries have issued more secure notes, and Norway did not want to end up with the least secure notes in its region (Norges Bank).

Switzerland went further than most by removing people from the money. The Swiss National Bank states that the theme of the ninth series is the many facets of Switzerland, that each denomination depicts a typical Swiss characteristic represented by a key motif, and that the banknotes no longer feature images of individuals (Swiss National Bank). In place of portraits there is a recurring grammar: a hand performing an action that illustrates each note's theme, a shimmering globe, and a location. The globe is the cleverest touch. Across the sequence from 1000 francs down to 10 francs, the earth rotates once on its axis and passes through one full day.

Australia used natural history as its organising idea. The Reserve Bank of Australia states that each denomination in its Next Generation series features a different species of Australian wattle and a native bird within a number of the security features, and that on the five dollar note these are the Prickly Moses wattle and the Eastern Spinebill (Reserve Bank of Australia). Binding the theme to the security features rather than to the background art means the motif cannot be dropped for production reasons later.

Do the public get a vote on banknote design?

Increasingly yes, though almost never a binding one. The usual model is an open call for nominations, an independent advisory body that produces a shortlist, and a final decision taken by the central bank or a government minister. Canada has run this process twice in a decade and published the numbers both times.

The 2016 consultation is the fullest account available anywhere. The Bank of Canada sought input from more Canadians than ever to select an iconic Canadian woman for a regularly circulating note. The open call yielded more than 26,300 submissions and produced 461 qualifying nominees, and the process that led to Viola Desmond's selection also used representative surveys and focus-group testing, with the full reports prepared by external market research firms. The resulting vertical ten dollar note was issued on 19 November 2018 with the theme of rights and social justice (Bank of Canada).

The next Canadian five dollar note followed the same route with a different shape. Terry Fox was selected by the Minister of Finance from a short list of eight iconic Canadians drawn up by an independent Advisory Council, which reviewed over 600 nominations. The Bank has published what it knows so far: the note will be polymer, predominantly blue and vertical in orientation, with a portrait of Terry Fox on the front, and no release date is set because it will follow the vertical twenty (Bank of Canada).

Consultation also has limits worth understanding. The Bank of Canada reviewed its own process in 2014, developed the set of design principles above, and invited comment on them. Of the nearly 2,000 Canadians who responded, 80 percent supported the principles, with heavy interest in gender equality, multiculturalism and Indigenous representation. What the public was consulted on was the framework and the subject, not the layout, the palette or the security architecture. Our guide to women on banknotes looks at what these consultations have changed, and portraits on banknotes covers who ends up on the money and why.

How do security features shape the design?

They set the layout before the artwork exists. A window has to go where nothing important is printed. A watermark needs a clear field. A tactile mark needs an edge. A see-through register needs matching blank areas front and back. By the time a designer starts drawing, a significant part of the note is already committed.

The knock-on effects reach everywhere. Colour is constrained because optically variable inks shift through a fixed range and have to remain legible at both ends. Portrait placement is constrained because the watermark is usually a second version of the same portrait, which means the paper mill needs the engraving before the press does. Denomination numerals are constrained because they carry latent images and colour-shifting effects. Our reference on banknote security features works through each element and what it demands of the design around it.

Substrate choice changes the brief completely. Polymer cannot hold a watermark, so a polymer design has to plan a transparent window and the foil elements inside it from the start, and the window then becomes the strongest compositional element on the note. The Reserve Bank of Australia builds the clear window at the white-printing stage, before any colour is applied (Reserve Bank of Australia). Our comparison of polymer versus paper banknotes covers what each substrate makes possible, and banknote paper explains why the watermark has to be planned so early.

Which series show the design process best?

Six programmes between them cover every model in use: a single named designer, an anonymous central-bank team, a public nomination, a ministerial decision, a theme-led series with no portraits at all, and a security-led redesign that changed the shape of the note. Each row below is drawn from the issuing authority's own published material.

Who signs off on a banknote design?

Not the designer, and usually not the central bank alone. In Canada the Bank of Canada Act states that the form and material of the notes of the Bank shall be subject to approval by the Minister of Finance, so the Bank consults the minister throughout the process. In the euro area the decision to stop producing the 500 euro note was taken by the European Central Bank, not by any individual issuer.

The Bank of Canada also describes consulting relevant experts, organisations and government departments to ensure that the chosen subject matter is appropriately depicted, and maintains an Indigenous Advisory Circle with a published mandate and membership. Selection of the person on the next five dollar note went to the Minister of Finance from an independent Advisory Council's shortlist. That layered structure is typical: an open front end for ideas, an expert middle for judgement, and a political or institutional decision at the end.

One consequence for collectors is that a great deal of finished design work never reaches circulation. Proposed vignettes, rejected colour trials and cancelled denominations survive as die proofs and essays in central-bank collections, which is one reason specimen notes and proofs command the attention they do.

Why does a new banknote series take years?

Because design is only one of three phases. The Bank of Canada describes the process of designing a new note as taking a number of years and involving research and development, design, and production, in that order. Consultation happens in the first phase, engraving and plate making in the second, and print runs large enough to replace a whole denomination in the third.

Rollout adds more years still. Australia issued its Next Generation notes one denomination at a time over several years rather than all at once, because a central bank has to give cash-handling machine operators, retailers and the public time to adapt to each new note before the next arrives. The euro area did the same with the Europa series, finishing with the 100 and the 200 on 28 May 2019, six years after the first Europa note appeared.

Production timing is unforgiving at the end of the chain. Intaglio sheets at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing dry for three days after the backs are printed and another three after the faces, and only then do they go to numbering. Multiply that by a print run large enough to replace a national denomination and the calendar sets itself. Our guide to how banknotes are printed covers the manufacturing sequence in full.

Reading a note as a designed object changes what you notice in a collection. Continue with banknote sizes around the world for what the accessibility brief did to dimensions, intaglio printing and banknote engraving for the stage that turns the design into steel, or browse banknotes by country to see how different national briefs look side by side.

Planet Banknote is a family-owned dealership in Sarasota, Florida, founded in 2021. Every note is sourced direct from mints, central banks, and authorized distributors, inspected through our Planet Banknote Verified process, and ships with a free Certificate of Authenticity. US orders ship free via USPS Priority, and every order includes a free bonus gift.