20 Francs 6th series

The sixth series was designed in the late 1960s and early 1970s but held in reserve as a contingency — Swiss policy at the time required a complete replacement series to be ready before the current one was withdrawn. This note spent years in the vault before ever reaching circulation, part of a system that meant Switzerland effectively always had two generations of currency in existence simultaneously.

Ernst and Ursula Hiestand brought a graphic design sensibility unusual for central bank currency, rooted in the Swiss International Style. Orell Füssli, printing in Zurich since the sixteenth century, handled the entire series domestically — one of the few countries printing its own currency entirely in-house at that point.