New design for U.S. money will begin with $20 bill

WASHINGTON -- The last time Andrew Jackson got a makeover, he ended up with a big head, slightly off-center. This time, he will get a little color.

The most noticeable features of the last redesign of U.S. currency -- the oversized, off-center portraits -- produced all kinds of derisive nicknames: funny money, Monopoly money, cartoon money.

Color is coming, and government money makers are hoping for a warmer reception for the changes. The new $20, with its public unveiling set for the spring, is supposed to be in circulation as early as next fall.

Jackson is first in line for a makeover. After the new $20 makes its debut, the new $50 (Ulysses S. Grant) and the $100s (Benjamin Franklin) will follow within 18 months.

In the works is a five-year effort, costing up to $53 million, to educate people about the changes. An important goal is to help distinguish between genuine greenbacks and bogus bills.

"If we learned anything from the issuance of the $20 in 1998, it is that things that we get used to here, because we see it and work on it, when it is first in the hands of the public it is seen as dramatic," said Thomas Ferguson, director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. "Suddenly, we are asking them to accept something else."

Portrait engraver Thomas Hipschen, who is working on the current redesign, remembers spending countless hours during the last makeover meticulously hand-cutting into steel portraits of Jackson, Franklin and Grant for the new bills.

Public reaction

Relieved when the work was done, he then worried about the public reaction to the changes.

"You worry about what the press is going to do," he said. "I have an old clipping file about all the horrible things they said about the portraits that I engraved. Some fun things, too."

Everyone is a critic.

"Well, you are not going to please everybody. This is a situation where everybody is going to weigh in on it," Hipschen said. "You really have to have a thick skin, I think. But I don't really take it to heart that much. When my artist friends come back and say, 'What were you thinking?' -- that kind of hurts to the quick. But the general population, they are going to get on the bandwagon, one way or the other, and I'm just going to have to live with it."

To give the new bills color, the bureau has had to buy five printing presses, to operate in Washington and at a bureau facility in Fort Worth, Texas. To run the new presses, Ferguson said, some existing workers are getting trained, and a few new people have been hired.