The Brief
The Royal Mint invited tangerine to submit designs for the reverse of commemorative fifty pence coins celebrating the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. The designs needed to capture the ‘significance and friendly spirit’ of the games, with The Royal Mint Advisory Committee inspecting entries and selecting a winner. Final approval would be for the Chancellor of the Exchequer and, ultimately, the Queen herself.
Key insights
The multi-national team working in tangerine’s London office helped shape thinking about how we might evoke on a coin the range of culture, heritage and national pride within the Commonwealth. The design would also need instantly to reflect on the athletes whose power and grace made the ‘friendly games’.
The solution
The successful design was for a coin that celebrated Scotland, where the Games were being held. Having identified key symbols and elements, the process was then about painstaking manipulation of the features to find the perfect layout. A subtle Saltire, lettering that used the Charles Rennie Mackintosh font, a cyclist and a sprinter all featured within the 27.3mm diameter of a fifty pence coin.
The design story
The client says:
“What the Committee loved was the tone of what tangerine did – the spirit, the imagination and the intelligence.”
Dr Kevin Clancy, Committee Secretary and Director of the Royal Mint Museum
