I found this over at QBN yesterday.  Apparently it was a competition to design new bank notes, as described on the Swiss National Bank web site:

As part of the planning process for the development of a new banknote series, a competition for the artistic design of the new banknote series was launched at the beginning of 2005. Twelve artists were invited to present their designs for all six denominations on the theme “Switzerland open to the world”. The jury met in November 2005 to evaluate the submissions and to decide on the winning designs. These were presented at a news conference in Berne on 23 November 2005. You can view them by clicking on the names of the individual designers.

Here are a few examples of the winning entries:

Some of then are very strange, such as this entry that looks like it was made with Microsoft Paint.

All results can be found here.

I’m currently watching a really great documentary on synthesizers in Britain that is an incredible look at the early days of synth-pop. As a kid I was hugely into Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, New Order, The Cure, and plenty of other UK bands that were using synths in their music, so this video is pretty much taking me down memory lane.

From the BBC web site:
In the late Seventies small pockets of electronic artists such as The Human League, Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle were inspired by Kraftwerk and J G Ballard to dream of the sound of the future against the backdrop of bleak, high-rise Britain.

Gary Numan’s 1979 appearance on Top Of The Pops heralded the invention of synthpop, which would provide the soundtrack as Britain entered a new, ruthless era in the Eighties.

Depeche Mode, four lads from Basildon, came to embody the new sound, while post-punk bands such as Ultravox, Soft Cell, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and Yazoo took the synth from the pages of the NME and onto the front cover of Smash Hits.

By 1983 the Pet Shop Boys and New Order were pointing to where the future of electronic music lay – in dance.

Contributors to Synth Britannia include Philip Oakey, Vince Clarke, Martin Gore, Bernard Sumner, Gary Numan and Neil Tennant.

For more information visit the BBC web site here.