Notable Women was created in collaboration with Rosie Rios, the former Treasurer of the U.S. under President Obama, whose legacy centers around elevating the contributions of historic women in classrooms and on currency.

During her time in office, Treasurer Rios drove the Treasury Department’s initiative to put a woman on our currency for the first time in over 100 years. After a public outreach process in 2015, Harriet Tubman was chosen for this honor and announced as the new face of the $20 bill in 2016.

But the energy surrounding this outreach, which generated a database of almost 250 women from U.S. citizens across the country, inspired Treasurer Rios just as much as the chance to put one on currency.

Treasurer Rios asked us to consider how we might use technology to highlight the groundbreaking contributions of all of these women, transforming that energy into celebrating them.

Notable Women leverages augmented reality to reimagine who deserves one of the most iconic honors in America: a portrait on our currency.

All a user has to do is point their camera at any denomination of U.S. bill. This will trigger an AR overlay that replaces the existing man’s portrait with one of 100 notable women. From there, a user can tap that portrait to read her bio, or discover more leaders by pressing the arrows.

Made in partnership with Rosie Rios, the U.S. Treasurer under President Obama and the force behind the Harriet Tubman $20 bill, Notable Women lets anyone see 100 historic American women where they’ve historically been left out.

Thoughtfully designed for the classroom, this project empowers tomorrow’s leaders to learn about the women who shaped U.S. history in a place that, for more than 100 years, has only featured men.

The primary audience for Notable Women is teachers and students, so we emphasized learning touch-points throughout the project and optimized the project to be useful in the classroom.

We worked with educators and historians from the very beginning of the process to select women that are often missing from traditional curricula, and to ensure the project represented diversity of all kinds.

We created a teacher’s kit, including Common Core lesson plans, so that teachers don’t need to do extra prep work to bring Notable Women into the classroom.

We even decided to use lower resolution illustrations so that the app would download easily on some schools’ old devices or slower WiFi.

Finally, we ensured that the project was free to everyone—all they need is a phone and a dollar bill.

Our primary goal was to make the AR-enhanced bills as realistic as possible, and we recruited a nearly all-women development, design, and production team to bring them to life.

For each of the 100 notable women, we created seven different illustrations of her portrait to match the texture, colors and space constraints of each bill denomination. The AR shaders additionally adapt to fit the unique colors of each bill in any lighting.

The custom font, “Notable,” is a sans-serif derivation of the iconic “One Dollar” logotype, and the brand colors come from the greens and beiges of dollar bills (plus a bold coral accent.)

The end result is a breathtakingly realistic rendering of U.S. bills, supported by an engaging learning experience via the teacher’s kit. We launched during Back-to-School, so that teachers could start the year with a brand new, AR-powered experience around these amazing women.

Notable Women is the first AR experience built to highlight historic American women in the classroom. It’s actively being used in schools across the country to teach students about the dozens of women who have shaped U.S. history but have been left out of their textbooks.

Treasurer Rios continues to tirelessly elevate the contributions of women with her Empowerment 2020 and Teachers Righting History initiatives. Notable Women is now the cornerstone project in all of her presentations at schools, corporations, and government gatherings.

Since launch, Notable Women has inspired makers in other countries, from Hong Kong to the UK, to explore how they could remake it with their own currency or places of honor. We’ve also received enthusiastic responses from press and educators from around the world including Fast Company, the Webby Awards, author Margaret Atwood, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the NYC Department of Education.