The new designs are revealed. As you can see in the image, the Shield of the Royal Arms has been given a contemporary treatment and its whole has been cleverly split among all six denominations from the 1p to the 50p, with the £1 coin displaying the heraldic element in its entirety. This is the first time that a single design has been used across a range of United Kingdom coins.

The winning designer is 26-year-old Matthew Dent, originally from Bangor who now lives and works in London as a graphic designer.

In stark comparison check the new 5USD bill with a purple number 5.

Taste is subjective and design can only be judged within a cultural context. But I think it's pretty obvious that the British design is fresh and still manages to be traditional. While the dollar looks like a poorly patched up old fabric.

I would not know how to update a US currency while maintaining consistency across the range. I think it would be best to completely redesign all the banknotes using traditional elements. However this is not a way to go as the US would not like to expire old banknotes as it's been done in many other countries. I have no idea about the economic implications such a drastic change would cause. Probably a lot of people would have to take their stashed cash to banks, which would create a huge surplus of now invisible dollars.

We've introduced Brand, Agency and Country categories on AotW. Now you can not only browse through agencies and look at DDB ads, Saatchi ads, BBDO ads or Ogilvy ads etc., but also look at Nike ads, Toyota ads, or Absolut Vodka ads too.

Most importantly now on the browse ads page you can create your own combination of categories. This enables you to create custom pages, like Print ads from the USA or Automotive ads from Europe.

Hope this new feature will help make the site even more useful for inspiration and research!

More about the process.

This robot moves in ways that makes me shiver. Especially when "he" is on ice. The future is here.

If you have nothing else better to do, follow me on twitter! :)

Read the interview with Ted Disbanded. It is a blog about Disbanded people and Disbanded philosophy: things and persons who change the things. Apparently a lot of people from Italian advertising read it.

Ted: When did you realize AOTW was becoming so important?
Ivan: AotW was important for me from day one. But I realized it has become a factor in the industry when I started seeing creative CVs listing the appearance on Ads of the World as an achievement. At that point I realized that I have a responsibility here that goes beyond my own playground.

Ted: Who decides the entries in your blog?
Ivan: I do. When I'm in doubt I have a circle of friends and bloggers who occasionally give me their votes. Frederik Samuel from Canada, who does Adgoodness.com is one of them.

Ted: Do you think the ARCHIVE magazine hates you?
Ivan: I have full respect for Archive, it's a beautiful magazine, but it's too expensive and slow in 2008. They wanted to buy me off because there were people within the company who saw the potential, but Mr Lurzer didn't have the cash to buy me off.

I used to receive many emails from our members who told me they stopped subscribing to Archive, but not anymore. I wonder if they have any subscribers left. ;). I read on their site that they have 15 thousand subscribers for their quarterly magazine. And, I thought that's really low, because we have more than 40 thousand unique visitors per day! So I guess Archive doesn't hate me, they hate the internet as a whole. They hate change as every old company. They will never go away, but they will have hard time growing unless they do what every smart publisher does nowadays. They have to reinvent themselves.

Ted: How many people are in the AotW staff?
Ivan: It's just me as editor and webmaster and my parter from 2bits.com who does the backend and development of the site. We had to move servers 3 times and we went through one major engine upgrade too. There is so much technical stuff that you need to take care of when you have big traffic.