Well, the people that designed it, the people that commissioned it etc etc, but that wasn't really your point. You asked "how can a coin have aesthetic appeal?", which is what I answered.
Does it have 'Hull - City of Culture' printed on one side to commemorate , well , our status in 2017 .
ill be interested to see how our antiquated works vending machines cope with this - theres no way work will pay for new machines or refurbs
there's lots wrong with the current coin, fakes aside. it wears far more quickly than other coins. i have a fake one that i reassigned to my collection some years back. it was made of lead and painted. it scratched very easily. they also discolour very easily, so if you have one that's more or less black or dark brown, see if it scratches easily. fakes can also be spotted by the sound they make when dropped onto something. compare a real and fake in that way and there's little doubt. i thought i had a fake earlier this week, but it sounded like a real one.
The problem is that the Royal Mint have no idea about branding. If they called the new one pound coin "the five pound coin" instead of "the one pound coin" it would be a lot more popular.
Most fakes these days are not made of lead, generally melted down vending machine tokens....even experts find telling them apart difficult, the current belief is that 3 in 10 £1 coins are fake. There are going to be hidden security features within the new coin to prevent counterfeiting. The 3 year lead in is to allow vending machine makers to update their machines in plenty of time before introduction
I'm thinking it's more to do with the physical problems. You can't just rewrite the software to make the machine deal with the different shapes! Unless they are designed to fit in the same holders and dispensers which would mean there's nothing to do.
the royal mint says it's about 3 in 100 pounds that are fake. couldn't find estimates for other coins.
The mint charge UK plc £1.05 for every pound produced. So really, the forgers are saving us over £47mill a year. Why don't they make a 99p coin, then they wouldn't need to make as many pennies?
When checked by a tv show recently there was at least one fake in every bag of 20 & one had 9 fakes in it, the bags were received direct from banks/post offices
