August 2, 2010: "Time Flies"

Author:
C. Sloan

Concept:
While most everyone has seen a Fugio Copper, not everyone knows what the motifs and legends are intended to symbolize, or that they were created by Benjamin Franklin.

So with the help of our guest author we figured we’d spell it out as ‘Time Flies’ (so Mind Your Business), a shortened version of this famous Franklin quote:

"Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of."

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We had several versions of the final ad which endeavored to explain it further, such as:

"Sundial [TIME] + Fugio (Latin: I fly) [FLIES] = 223 years. We like Ben Franklin’s Math." But that seemed extremely long and slightly convoluted, so we shortened it to this:

"A 221-year coin with a Ben Franklin-designed rebus."

But we decided that we really needed to include that math formula-style definition, which is how we arrived at the final ad.