Rather than simply commissioning one artist behind closed doors, The Royal Mint launched a public competition.
The challenge was significant.
Designers were not being asked to create a special commemorative coin celebrating a single anniversary or famous person.
They were being asked to rethink the appearance of Britain's everyday money.
Whatever was selected could potentially be handled by millions of people.
It had to work at tiny scale.
It had to survive repeated reproduction in metal.
It had to be recognizable.
It had to feel appropriate for national currency.
And the different denominations needed to make sense both individually and collectively.
More Than 4,000 Designs
The response to the competition was enormous.
By the time submissions closed in November 2005, more than 4,000 designs had been submitted by 526 people.
It was an extraordinary number of ideas for objects that most people rarely think of as designed objects at all.
Participants explored different ways of representing Britain.
Some ideas drew on plants.
Others considered buildings, landscapes, birds and traditional symbols.
The Royal Mint Advisory Committee faced the enormous task of reducing thousands of submissions to a manageable shortlist.
The committee also had to consider a fundamental question:
Should each denomination have a completely separate image?
Or could Britain's coins function as a visual family?
That second possibility ultimately became central to the winning concept.
The designs were gradually narrowed down until only a small number of possibilities remained.
Because the competition was anonymous during the selection process, the judges initially evaluated the work without knowing the identities of the designers.
Among the finalists was an entry identified as "Designer Z."
Designer Z was Matthew Dent.
And his solution approached the assignment in an unusual way.
Matthew Dent's Search for a Unifying Idea
Dent was a young graphic designer who had trained at Coleg Menai in North Wales and later at the University of Brighton.
He had seen the Royal Mint competition advertised and decided to enter.
But the concept that eventually won was not necessarily his first idea.
Dent explored multiple approaches.
He considered subjects including birds, plants, architecture and coastal scenery.
One of the central challenges was how to represent the different nations of the United Kingdom while working across six separate denominations.
A landscape stretching from one coin onto another was one possibility.
Eventually, however, Dent turned toward heraldry.
Heraldic imagery has an extraordinarily long relationship with British coinage. Royal symbols, shields, lions, crowns and coats of arms have appeared on coins for centuries.
The challenge was finding a way to use that tradition without simply producing another conventional heraldic coin.
Dent's breakthrough was to stop treating the six coins as six isolated canvases.
Instead, he could treat them as pieces of one canvas.
The Royal Shield could be divided across the denominations.
Each coin would display only one portion.
When arranged together, those portions would reconstruct the larger image.
Suddenly, the physical fact that Britain had several different coin denominations became part of the artwork itself.
The coins did not merely share a theme.
They depended on one another visually.
Six Pieces of One Shield
The final concept placed sections of the Shield of the Royal Arms across the 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p and 50p coins.
Each denomination was given a particular section of the shield.
That explains why looking at one of the coins in isolation can initially feel slightly strange.
Traditional coin designs are often centered.
A portrait, building, animal or symbol usually sits comfortably within the circular or polygonal boundary of the coin.
Dent deliberately challenged that convention.
His images appear cropped.