Coin design is not a familiar art. Most of us don’t have time to think about the design of the coins we use everyday, and very few female artists have penetrated the professional side of this industry. Nourhan Yehia, a young painter turned coin designer, who spent years working as an art activity leader at the Ministry of Culture’s Cultural Palaces and won the ministry’s Creative Woman Award in 2019, is one example.
Born in 1990, Yehia graduated from the Painting Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University in 2012. A few years after her graduation, she developed a passion for Coptic and Islamic heritage. Old wooden windows and doors always caught her eye. She has always admired the light and shadow and the high technical qualities of ancient wooden crafts. As a young artist, she often found herself painting old Islamic architecture with mashrabiyas as a background.
To explore Islamic heritage further, Yehia earned a Bayt Jameel diploma in 2019, a two-year programme sponsored by the King’s Foundation. “It was a great joy studying Islamic geometrical ornamentation and design,” she recalls, “especially those workshops by foreign visiting artists from the foundation. We worked with different materials, namely copper, wood, pottery and gypsum.”
For her graduation project, she chose to work with copper on wood crust. “I found out that there are many common characteristics between Coptic and Islamic geometrical ornamentation. I also learned more about symbols, and that behind each line there is a story and a meaning. For example, the flower of life, which is an old geometric symbol consisting of overlapping circles, is a symbol of connection between all parts of the universe.
“I fell in love with mangoor, an old craft resembling mashrabiya making but with some differences. While it is about to go extinct in Egypt, it is now thriving in Saudi Arabia and where call it rawasheen. It takes time and effort to produce a mangoor piece, a significant and rare thing, since it cannot be reproduced, starting from the design to different stages of production.”
Yehia, who was only the second student to specialise in this craft, mastered mangoor and copper on wood. Inspired by Bukhariyat ornamentation similar to what you can sometimes see on the opening page of a Quran, she tries to combine Islamic art with spiritual feeling. “I have a great passion for all handcrafts. Unfortunately, people do not appreciate the value of delicate crafts any more. Selling such items is increasingly difficult,” she lamented.
After her diploma, she felt the need to learn Arabic calligraphy. She joined a six-month calligraphy diploma at Alqalam school in Old Cairo. In time she joined the Ministry of Finance’s coinage department, where she applied all her expertise in Islamic art design and calligraphy. In her drawing and design department, there are only two female artists. She is the youngest.
She has since designed the National Council for Women a memorial 25- pound coin celebrating its 25th anniversary. “Although it seems a formal field, working in the department gave me an opportunity to apply geometric designs I learned all through my art journey.” As a designer, her work includes coins, both for circulation and memorial, as well as badges.
“The difference between designing a coin and any other work of art is the nature of the metal and the limited size, which is approximately 2.5 cm. In such a limited space, the design should directly grab the attention of ordinary people and convey a message. In addition, the design should be both creative and simple, compatible with the limited size and circular shape of the coin.
“The greatest challenge is to balance aesthetic values with technical and security considerations. For example, my latest design of a one-pound coin on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Al-Karnak Company, part of Egypt Air, required imagining a series of sketches and a storyboard related to flight mechanisms to achieve the final design.”
For her designs, Yehia is usually inspired by meaningful visual symbols in Coptic and Islamic heritage, which she reinvents in a contemporary format. To the latter end, she also studied graphic design.
“I hadn’t realised that coinage is a process that takes such a long time to complete, from suggesting a design to supervising it in the coin factory, which is attached to the Coinage Administration. More than painting, this work needs patience, control, consistency, and flexibility. I think I inherited my passion for coin design from my father, who was a big collector of coins.
“I am happy that my job is not routine work. I aspire to continue in the coin design field. Anyway, I am still learning, and art — to be distinguished from design — has its own abiding allure. I am not sure about my next art project. I am currently thinking of exploring installation, as it could assimilate heritage crafts like mangoor with contemporary art.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 21 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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