Matthew Dent (born in 1981 in Bangor,

Wales Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the Bristol Channel to the south. It had a population in ...

) is a British

graphic designer A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography, or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, ...

. His designs were selected for the new reverse sides of seven

coins of the pound sterling The standard circulating coinage of the United Kingdom, British Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories is denominated in pennies and pounds sterling ( symbol "£", commercial GBP), and ranges in value from one penny sterling t ...

, after a competition open to the public by the

Royal Mint The Royal Mint is the United Kingdom's oldest company and the official maker of British coins. Operating under the legal name The Royal Mint Limited, it is a limited company that is wholly owned by HM Treasury, His Majesty's Treasury and is un ...

on 2 April 2008. Dent studied art at Coleg Menai and graduated in

graphic design Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdiscip ...

from the

University of Brighton The University of Brighton is a public university based on four campuses in Brighton and Eastbourne on the south coast of England. Its roots can be traced back to 1858 when the Brighton School of Art was opened in the Royal Pavilion. It achi ...

. The competition was to re-design the reverses of all circulation British coins (except the two pound coin which had only been introduced eleven years earlier). His entry was selected as the best of 4,000 and he was given a one-off payment of £35,000. Dent's designs were inspired by heraldry. He divided the shield of the

Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom The royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom, or the royal arms for short, is the arms of dominion of the British monarch, currently King Charles III. These arms are used by the King in his official capacity as monarch of the United Kingdom. Varia ...

among the pence coins, so that when they are placed together they show the entire shield. The full shield appears on his pound coin, which before the competition had no fixed design, instead changing every year to represent Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland. In 2011 he designed a commemorative fifty pence coin for the Royal Mint to celebrate 50 years of the

World Wildlife Fund The World Wide Fund for Nature Inc. (WWF) is an international non-governmental organization founded in 1961 that works in the field of wilderness preservation and the reduction of human impact on the environment. It was formerly named the W ...

. It featured 50 small pictures of plants, animals and natural resources. In 2012 he designed a limited edition two pound coin featuring the face of

Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian er ...

made up from his book titles, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth.

References

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* * 1981 births Alumni of the University of Brighton British graphic designers Living people People from Bangor, Gwynedd British currency designers {{graphic-designer-stub