April 2, 2007: "Only the Note"

Author:
MaryAnn Agre

Concept:
We wanted to communicate that this note (unlike others of this type) bears the signature of John Hart, original signatory to the Declaration of Independence.

The problem was finding the right words in what became a very awkward challenge which seemed to require using the word ‘signer’ or ‘signatory’ (itself a very awkward word) twice – once about this note, once about the Declaration.

We struggled a lot with this one until my wife finally came up with the elegant solution.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
"While John Hart was known for signing these New Jersey notes, he also signed a little known document called the Declaration of Independence." was the best one we could think of, but I just couldn’t get passed the redundancy.

Just about to give up on the signer-signatory idea, we actually considered using "If you wanted to add just one single colonial note to your collection, this would be an excellent choice." but thank goodness we didn’t. To me this is a good example of a caption that doesn’t say anything, isn’t interesting, or memorable, and could be used by any dealer in any CoinWorld ad to describe anything. So we put the kibosh on it.