By Jeannine Aversa
Associated Press
Dec. 2, 2002

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 moneymakers are hoping for a warmer reception for the changes. The new $20 bill, 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 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.

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

Relieved at first 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.

"Well, you are not going to please everybody. This is a situation where everybody is going to weigh in on it," Hipschen said.

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. To run the new presses, Ferguson said, some existing workers are getting trained and a few new people have been hired. The Fort Worth plant is being expanded, providing room for the new presses and space for public tours, he said.

Adding color to the notes is a challenge.

Green and black ink is now used on neutral-colored paper. With the makeover, color tints will be added in the neutral areas of the note. Ferguson would not say which colors will be used, but said they will vary by denomination.

Moneymakers want the new notes to have an American look and feel, and not be confused with, for instance, the colorful euro, the paper currency of the European Union.

Recent changes in paper money design have been driven by the desire to thwart high-tech counterfeiters. Over the years, counterfeiters have graduated from offset printing to increasingly sophisticated, and readily available, color copiers, computer scanners, color ink jet printers and publishing-grade software.

Some anti-counterfeiting features included in the last redesign will be retained, the bureau said.

Under the redesign, the size of the notes will not change and the same faces will appear on the same bills. But the portraits and buildings may be presented differently.

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