My design Conversation with Roman Mars
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Roman Mars has built one of podcasting’s great empires out of noticing things everyone else walks past. His show, 99% Invisible, has racked up over 500 million downloads telling stories about the unnoticed design choices that quietly shape how cities and objects work…
Tyler and Roman discuss street signs, why classic cars were so much more distinctive than today’s SUVs, Waymos, New Jersey jughandles, yellow streetlights, lane-stripe colors, why Houston keeps growing despite its lack of charm, whether any post-war American suburb is actually beautiful, the Chrysler Building’s rocky reception, brutalism done right and wrong, Central Park as an urban miracle, what Jane Jacobs got wrong, e-bike lanes, Tokyo’s bike-free transit model, the placelessness of global coffee shops, why the iPhone looks boring now, the ugliest country he’s visited, his love for Australia’s polymer notes, his soft spot for the dollar’s “locked in amber” weirdness, underground power lines, how to warn future civilizations about nuclear waste, why highway signs lie to you about speed limits, the principles of a great city flag, the Pocatello redesign saga, his own studio, why 99% Invisible works precisely because it’s audio-only, the most unusual habit behind his long productive career, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Yes. One of my favorite topics, currency design. What’s your favorite currency in terms of how it looks?
MARS: Favorite? It’s like I love almost any of them with the US currency in dead last. I find things to love about them. I’ve done a story on Australian currency, which was one of the early polymer notes. I just like utility in currency. I like different sizes. I like different colors. I like the fact that they put on artists and people of note that are not founding fathers and presidents and stuff like this. I don’t know if I have a particular favorite, but I was entranced by the thoughtfulness and utility of Australian currency when I did a story about it. You could be blind and know what note you’re holding because of the size. They stand up pretty well, and they care about all kinds of things rather than just presidents and stuff.
COWEN: I loved Swiss currency pre-2021. They had Le Corbusier on, Giacometti, Honegger. In the 1980s, they had Euler on, the mathematician. Imagine putting Euler on your country’s currency.
MARS: That is a canvas that’s so available to us to represent more values than we have in the United States than just founding fathers and presidents and stuff. I think it’s just such a wasted opportunity.
COWEN: I like the dollar, though. I’m surprised you’re so negative. I like the weird esotericism: the eye, the pyramid. The design is bizarre. It announces to the world: “We’re crazy.”
MARS: There are things to love about it. I just think that its fussiness and filigree, we’re locked in, I think for important reasons, which is because the dollar is the most important currency in the world, to which all other currencies are pegged, and therefore you don’t change it lightly. You have to be very, very careful. It really locked it into amber in a way that is both beautiful to admire, but also really limits its utility as things move on, we get better things than linen-paper hybrids and especially different sizes and utility for people with different needs. I think that’s important. There’s definitely things to love about the dollar. The dollar has some charm.
COWEN: I like the arrogance of it also. A sense of we don’t need to make the denominations look so different. If you’re a foreigner, we expect you’ll come here a lot, you’ll master dollars. Maybe you use them in your home country as well. They don’t need to be different colors.
MARS: It is definitely a bold statement that you’re going to adapt to our way of being if you’re going to use the dollar, for sure.
Opinions throughout!