We were commissioned by the talented folks at Agosto to design a set of eight banknotes for the Bankinter campaign Your Money, Your Effort. The project was the bank’s response to unsung heroes of the Covid pandemic.

The goal was to create fictional banknotes that had the look and feel of the real thing.

O Street created the notes in the same painstaking way that we designed the new polymer currencies for Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulster Bank. From the smallest textures of the background micro-patterns and denomination frames to the hand-drawn illustrations which complemented each person’s occupation, everything was conceived and crafted with care and attention to detail.

The notes feature portraits by renowned illustrator Martin Morck, which bring vibrance and human depth to the project.

The notes came together alongside the characters they featured, in a moving advert filmed and produced by Agosto.

The advert resonated with audiences on television and had three million views in the first week online. On YouTube, it quickly generated passionate comments describing it as “the best advertisement of the pandemic for sure”, “the best advertisement a bank has ever made”, “for me, this is the hymn of confinement” and—our personal favourite—“you bastards made me cry!”