I feel like the design guidelines were fundamentally flawed, and as a logical result none of the design proposals are better than what we already have. The whole "some person's face" thing doesn't work because most people won't be familiar with them. Heck, you'd be lucky if the average person is familiar with their names ! The birds & buildings suffer from the same issue: never seen them, can't identify them, don't c…
There’s millennia of history of having coins and paper money faces that most people will not be familiar with.
> The previous two series - depicting bridge types and building styles - neatly bypassed this by being something everyone could relate to,
I don’t see much difference there. Just as many people can’t see more than “man with beard” or “bird with long legs”, I bet many people can’t seen more than “old bridge” or “modern bridge” for the current designs (what fraction of the population can discriminate the €5 ‘classical’ from the €10 ‘romanesque’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_banknotes)?)