What if banknotes were issued not only by countries but by companies as well?
That’s the question being posed by French graphic and motion designer Jade Dalloul, whose “Brand Currency” illustrations are exploring the future of currency. After all, countless brands and corporations have a greater gross domestic product; a higher number of assets; and more employees than some entire nations.
For example, Walmart employs 2.2 million people while the population of Slovenia is 2.1 million. Furthermore, Apple’s economic output in 2014 was $87 billion USD—about $5 billion USD more than Oman’s annual GDP.
“For few decades, we were told that State has to be modernized,” reads Dalloul’s website. “The Welfare state is exhausted in front of the crisis, and the economic mutation, the idea of its poor management has grown. With the rise to power of companies’ directors, the step is taken.”
Click the video below to see some of Dalloul’s “Brand Currency” coinage.
HIGHLIGHTING BRAND ICONS
“Seeing countries electing CEOs for presidents, and countries behaving like companies was the genesis,” Dalloul told CNN last month.
Seven different ‘Brand Currency’ banknote styles explore the future of currency. (Photo by Jade Dalloul)
The artist used various brands’ mission statements as if they were national mottos alongside a portrait of the companies’ founders as if they were intellectual or political figures. What’s more, Dalloul highlighted “strong brand icons” in the same way regimes have highlighted ideologies throughout history.
“Doing so, I also tried to root legitimacy of these brands in putting places related to their history, like the first gas pump for Shell, or the new Apple campus,” he writes on his website.
“I have also imagined this currency with worldwide influences, displaying both vertical and horizontal reading directions, the same way the Venezuelan bolivar and Swiss franc do. Eventually I chose the uniform scale derived from the US dollar bill for all units and used the same ratio width/height originally found in the Euro. I have as well make sure to respect the raster process and the complexity against counterfeiting.”