Modern coin designs

bbfirebird

Whats the deal with modern coin designs? When did the cent and half dollar have the obverse redesigned? I've noticed this on coins of the past 10 years or so. The portraits just look terrible- almost just line drawings. Same thing with the quarter obverse that began with the State Quarters program.

Why did the mint do this? Does it save money somehow, or what?

edix2001

The designs changes are purely technical, to lengthen the life of dies.

19Lyds

Coin designs have been modified over the years to accomodate faster and faster high speed coining presses. It sucks but then that the end result of high technlogy and increased coinage demands by the country.



For the Kennedy, a major redesign came about in 1995 and then another in 2005. But Mr. Kennedy's head has been slowly shrinking over the years as can be seen above.

One of the first major changes came with the introduction of the Spaghetti Hair Kennedy in 1991 while the head actually got reduced in size in 1995.

cladking

The mint is wasting so much effort, time, and money making pennies
with a negative value that they literally don't have time to wait for high
relief coins to strike up. Presses are run at full operating speed to keep
up with the "demand" for billions of coins per year.

Of course the sole reason for the penny demand is that they have no
value so aren't reused.

ProofArtworkonCircs

Another "advantage" of low relief dies is that enables the "one squeeze" hubbing process. Canada went through the same moves just before we did. The last two heads of the Queen have been Canadian copies of very similiar British ones, but in lower relief.