This beautiful coin won a Dutch contest to design a 5 euro commemorative coin. The winning designer, Stani Michiels, (actually, it’s more the winning architect) has a nice detailed process story about the winning design. The stunning thing for me was that the entire process of designing the coin was all done with free software — Python, SPE editor, PIL, pyCairo, Gimp, Inkscape, Phatch — on an Asus Eee PC that ran Ubuntu.

Absolutely stunning work and a glowing tribute to the versatility, quality and cost of Linux in a ‘production’ environment. If only Linux and most other free software were easy enough for more people (like our parents) to access and use on their desktops, the world might be better, freer and less energy-hungry than it is now.

[Via Design Oberserver]