Geeked out coin wins design comp

Stani Michiels, artist by day and Python hacker by night, created a five euro coin using only free software for a design competion issued by the Dutch mint, and won. The coin, commemorating a rich Dutch architectural tradition, should be available nowish.

The coin’s obverse consists of a portrait of the queen made up out of the names of famous architects, and the reverse displays an outline of the country that doubles as a skyline made by positioning architecture books in a circle.

Michiels — a Belgian responsible for SPE-IDE, a Python IDE, and Phatch, a photo editor — outlines all the little design details in a long blog post, including the software he used (Python, of course) and the calculations and Google search results that went into this design. Unfortunately the mint would not allow Michiels to release the designs under the GPL license.

The Netherlands has a long tradition of meaningful and elaborately designed money, as we touched upon earlier.

Via LWN.net.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Architecture, Design, Dutch first. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Belgium, coins, competitions, mint, money, Python