William Krawczewicz

William Krawczewicz grew up in Severna Park, Maryland, born in 1967. He studied at the University of Maryland, and straight out of college he landed a job at the United States Mint — the federal agency that strikes the nation's coins. That is where the coin work in this catalog comes from.

But coins were only the start. Along the way he spent time in the design department at the Clinton White House, and then made the move that defined his career: he joined the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the agency that prints America's paper money. As of 2007 he was one of just three banknote designers in the entire country.

That is the joke behind the nickname. His friends call him "Dollar Bill" — and he has now designed both kinds of dollar, the coin and the note. He is, by his own account, not a coin collector at all. What he collects is foreign banknotes, studying how other countries solve the same design puzzles he faces at work. "I just really enjoy my job," he told the numismatic newsletter The E-Sylum in 2007. "I want the notes to look as beautiful as possible."

To read Krawczewicz's coins correctly, you have to understand a quiet split in how the U.S. Mint makes them. A designer draws the image. A sculptor-engraver then carves that drawing into the raised, three-dimensional model the coin's dies are cut from. Krawczewicz worked mostly as the designer — the artist whose drawing starts the whole process — while staff sculptors like Thomas D. Rogers and T. James Ferrell turned his art into metal.

His most efficient piece of work is also his most-seen. For the 1995 run of Atlanta Olympic silver dollars, Krawczewicz designed a single reverse — the tails side — showing two hands clasped beneath the Olympic flame and rings. That one drawing was then used as the common reverse across all four of the 1995 silver dollars: Cycling, Track & Field, Gymnastics, and the Paralympic Blind Runner. Four different obverses, one Krawczewicz reverse tying the set together.

His banknote work runs on a different logic. On the redesigned $10, $20 and $50 bills, he handled the color, the layout, and the "freedom" icons woven through the security background — but, notably, not the portraits. The faces of Hamilton, Jackson and Grant were already fixed. Krawczewicz designed everything around them: the architecture of a bill that has to be both beautiful and nearly impossible to counterfeit.