Mari Ness - And as long as I'm on a roll of hatred here...

The Florida quarter.

Ack.

Triple Ack, actually.

Those of you outside the United States may not know that in 1999, the U.S. Treasury decided to make Coins More Interesting by announcing that over the next few years, our quarters would be dedicated to the 50 states, in the order in which these states first joined the union. We started with Delaware, which was a pretty awful coin, all things considered, and continued every few months with some awful coins which I am mentally surpressing and the surprisingly cheery coin from Louisiana which has banjos. (At least I think that's Louisiana. Maybe it's Tennessee. Please feel free to correct me.) The coin designs were, in a grave miscalculation, left up to the individual states.

As you might guess, these coins have done little to establish a state image in anybody's mind, mostly because the coins are, for the most part, boring. I will admit that I do look at quarters to see if a new state has jumped in there, and then I pretty much stop thinking about it. And, frankly, if you showed me the coin's image and removed the state name, in most cases I couldn't tell you what state the coin referred to. Some of the coins are kinda pretty -- one coin has ships, and another coin has a bird, and then there's the coin with the banjos, and a coin with drums or something, but for the most part, the coins are pretty uninspired and extremely underwhelming.

So it's not as if Florida had a lot to live up to here, but, astoundingly, they fell short even of those low expectations.

The coin has the distinct look of something created by an astoundingly untalented committee -- a committee, moreover, that couldn't decide what image to put on the coin. So they put on three images:

1) A pirate ship. (At least, I think it's a pirate ship.)

2) A small beach with two palm trees.

3) The space shuttle. (At least, the consensus is that this is supposed to be the space shuttle. The rendition is so small and so poor that it could be a plane carrying oranges in the back for all we know.)

Now, any of these, except maybe for the pirate ship, could have worked as a nice Symbol of Florida. We have nice beaches with palm trees, and we would like people to spend their money, and thus their quarters, on nice long visits to our nice beaches. So that's fine. We also have the space shuttle mission, and that's very high tech and scientific and very impressive, so that's fine. The pirate ship could even serve as a nice metaphor for the way the various tourist corporations of Florida are willing to seize your money when you come down to sit on the nice beaches and look at the space shuttle flying off into orbit, so that's fine too. Maybe not great, and maybe not exactly the image we want to project, but still, symbolic. (A nice image of a friendly cruise ship might have been better.) And no one can deny that a pirate ship looks very cool, and if it had been the sole image on the coin, nobody would have known what it meant, but our coin still would have looked better than whatever North Carolina put together.

No, the problem isn't really with any of the individual images, but the fact that these images are squeezed together, along with the words "Florida," "1845" (the year Florida entered the Union) "Gateway to Discovery," "2004" and "E PLURIBUS UNUM" which is rather a lot to put on a coin that has a diameter of one inch. In fact, entirely too much. To see this coin, you have to bring it to your face and squint (I tested this on a few coworkers and they all did the same thing) which will result in the same response, "What's with the boat?" (Or, in some cases, "Is this a ship?" or "Why is the plane carrying oranges?")

In other words, a complete failure to communicate anything other than Florida is extremely muddled. It's like a case study in how not to do brand equity marketing.