Designing Life – Inside Crane’s Award-Winning House Note

Meet Nazan Tekbaş, Lead Banknote Designer

When Crane Currency set out to design The Beauty of Life – its most ambitious house note to date – one of the key creative forces behind the project was Nazan Tekbaş, Senior Banknote Designer and Engraver at Crane Currency in Malta. With deep roots in traditional engraving and a sharp eye for how art and technology can enhance one another, she led the visual development of a note that celebrates both nature and innovation.

Nazan combines the precision of an engraver with the vision of an artist, creating a design that captures movement, color, and depth in harmony. The result reflects Crane’s belief that a banknote can embody both security and storytelling – and the work has already been recognized with the prestigious IOTA Award.

From Sketch to Security

Nazan’s path to banknote design began in Türkiye, where she studied graphic design before pursuing a master’s degree in original printing techniques. “I always loved drawing,” she recalls. “Even before my formal studies, I was fascinated by line, form, and texture – all essential to engraving.”

After graduation, she joined the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye in Ankara, where she spent 20 years refining her craft as an engraver and later as a designer.

At the time, engraving was a purely manual process. “We transferred drawings onto metal plates by hand,” she explains. “Later, as technology evolved, we began working with special laser engraved patterns and specialized software designed for security engraving.”

Nazan mastered these tools, combining precision technology with artistic intuition. The software helps her manage line weight according to grayscale, but she is still the one who builds line construction and density. Despite the advanced technology, engraving remains a deeply human skill.

In 2019, Nazan joined Crane Currency in Malta – a move she describes as both a professional milestone and a creative dream.

“I already knew many of the Tumba team in Sweden from industry conferences, and I admired Crane’s house notes. It was my dream to design one myself.”

Designing The Beauty of Life House Note

The Beauty of Life project had a clear vision: to merge nature’s delicate forms with the precision of security design.

As the lead designer, Nazan experimented with ways to integrate the new MOTION SURFACE® stripe into the composition, moving away from traditional rectangular forms common to OVDs to create instead a fluid, organic marriage of the stripe’s many discrete visual effects with the overall print design. The process, which stretched over eight months, involved countless sketches, refinements, and tests before the final balance of color, depth, and movement was achieved. Other elements in the design draws the eye’s attention toward the MOTION SURFACE stripe.

The team started with a design produced on paper. However, the goal was always to adapt the same design to polymer – a process that required a wide range of technical ingenuity.

“The application of MOTION SURFACE differs across substrates. On paper, we could print offset beneath the feature for a smooth color transition. On polymer, we couldn’t print below the stripe, and the available substrate colors were limited to two. That meant we had to simplify certain details, like removing the ladybug and the fine leaf structure from the polymer note.”

Collaboration Across Continents

Nazan made the general design of the MOTION SURFACE stripe in Malta, then collaborated closely with Crane’s micro-optic team in Alpharetta, Georgia – especially the micro-optics designer Kalani Strange.

“We fine-tuned the effects for the snail and the jumping frogs together, adjusting the micro-optic design to synchronize perfectly with the rest of the stripe and the note. One of the biggest challenges is avoiding a loss of depth while maintaining a striking three dimensional effect. We used four different adjacent security effects which engage the public naturally. Looking back, I think we achieved a very balanced version with powerful visual effects.”

The Designer’s Reflection

The tactile signature of Nazan’s designs comes from intaglio printing. By turning flat images into raised lines and patterns, textures we associate with the authenticity of money –craftsmanship and security meet in the smallest detail.

“I’m very happy with the paper version of the house note, but both notes are beautiful in their own way,” she says. “The new MOTION SURFACE makes a huge difference – and the new software allows us to unlock the design potential to increase visibility and expressiveness.”

Looking Ahead

She remains passionate about keeping the art of engraving alive in the age of digital design. “There are very few engravers left in the world,” she says. “In banknotes, engraving is both an artistic tradition and a crucial security feature. It still draws the holder’s eye – and their trust.”

The Beauty of Life isn’t just a house note – it’s a showcase of how craftsmanship and technology can coexist, and how the beauty of life itself can be captured, line by line, in the smallest details of design.

She describes The Beauty of Life house notes as “almost like watercolor paintings – soft, multi-layered, and full of subtle transitions.” The back of the note, she adds, was inspired by Asian aesthetics with smooth gradients and gentle colors that feel calm and balanced.

For Nazan Tekbaş, every line engraved is a reminder that security and beauty should be linked.