State Quarter Design Process

Many collectors wonder how the Mint comes up with some of the coin designs we see. Some of them are beautiful works of art that take your breath away, while others are so awful that you wonder how they ever made it onto a coin. When I got an email from Lenny M. in Los Angeles, asking who decides what designs will appear on the State Quarters, I realized that the answer wasn't so simple. Although the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury has the final say on what gets coined by the U.S. Mint, he has nothing to do with the actual design process at all! So, do the artists get to decide what the images on the coins are? Nope, they must draw the artwork from very short, carefully worded "coin design narratives." It turns out that our coin design process has numerous steps, with input from dozens of people, and it takes months to complete the cycle!

• The State Quarter Design Process