This is bucking a trend: A vertical dollar bill.

George Washington is spun 90 degrees — and turned into Barack Obama — to update the staid U.S. greenback and create money more in tune with people’s habits. And perhaps boost economic traction, said the winner of an online campaign to jazz up Yankee currency.

“When you hand people dollar bills, you tend to hand them vertically,” said Rob Duncan, the 37-year-old San Francisco artist voted tops in the Dollar ReDe$ign Project.

“When you put them into machines, it’s vertically. When they’re stacked in cash registers, it’s vertically. People tend to pull bills out of their wallets on the side, then your hand starts to automatically turn to a more vertical position — so it made sense to be more vertical.”

But would that vertical look fit the bill in Canada, where our single dollar is now a coin and paper money — as of next year — will no longer be paper but polymer?

Would we have to junk those idyllic hockey scenes sprawling across the back of notes for tighter, longer snapshots, such as bungee jumping, tobogganing and lumberjack tree-climbing contests?

The Bank of Canada will launch a new series of notes in late 2011. But if Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s beefy mug will anchor the narrow end of his bill, instead of gazing off at a big number “5” to the right, it’s a secret.

“We can’t disclose anything about the new design,” said Bank of Canada spokeswoman Julie Girard, citing security concerns.

What is known is that Canada has never had a vertical bill. China and Japan had them during epochs of dynasties and warlords. More recently, so have the Swiss.

Canada’s loyalty to the horizontal note is probably based on how most Europeans and North Americans read, said Paul Berry, the chief curator at the Bank of Canada’s Currency Museum in Ottawa.

“We’re used to reading from left to right, so it makes sense for the notes to look like that,” he said.

“Notes are not just a static means of exchange, even though that may be their purpose. They also convey information, even if that information is limited to the denomination of the note and where it can be redeemed for hard cash.

“So it stands to reason if you want to lay down a body of text that’s easily understandable and you’re not breaking it up with one word on every line, then you’ll orient the note in that (horizontal) fashion.”

Canadians weren’t picky about monetary aesthetics in our fledgling nation’s early days. Round was the “in” shape 400 years ago when cold, hard cash meant coins. And not a lot of reading.

In the 16th century, pioneers scavenged currencies from other places — mostly precious metal coins from Spain, France or Mexico — when the money they’d brought from their European homelands was depleted. Slivers or chunks were hacked off solid silver and gold coins to make payments. With no national government or banking system in place to prop up a unique Canadian currency, this patchwork bartering was common.

Besides chopping guineas and doubloons to bits, there were other flaws with the system. A shortage of coins was a perennial problem (settlers would take or ship the gold and silver medallions back to Europe), as was the aggressive rise of counterfeiters flooding areas with slugs.

“They would prepare fake pieces out of base metal, plate them with a good metal and hope, of course, that nobody noticed,” Berry said.

Paper was used in the form of promissory notes when cash was short, but those notes were not vertical IOUs. When ye olde quill hit the parchment to detail future payment for, say, a load of beaver pelts for Spanish bullion, it was in a wide letter form.

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In the late 1600s, the North American paper trail that would lead to currency in bill form arose from a deck of cards and broke French soldiers.

King Louis XIV’s government needed to pay its standing troops in “New France,” but the cash vault here was bare. Enterprising French authorities in the colony used decks of playing cards as emergency money. The amount owed to each soldier was written on the back, signed by a king’s agent, then redeemed when the royal treasure ships arrived in the St. Lawrence.

In this instance, vertical became horizontal. The playing cards were turned sideways to accommodate script and signatures.

Canada’s paper money has been regularly redesigned since the first charter banks, such as the Bank of Montreal and the Bank of Upper Canada in Toronto, began issuing notes — all horizontal — in the early 19th century.

The notes were often hand-signed by bank authorities and printed on one side, first in black and white then with little daubs of red or blue as primitive security measures. The Canada Security Printing Tint — the green shading on bills — was developed in Montreal in the mid-19th century as a way to further foil counterfeiters. The colouring was quickly adopted by Americans, who inked both sides of their early bills. Hence, their famous “greenback.”

Canadians have generously splashed colour on horizontal bills since the 1930s. Those vivid hues will likely remain when paper gives way to polymer, a hardier plastic material that can carry new security technology — such as transparent or opaque gaps for encryption.

As for going vertical, why not? We already read from top to bottom for tickets to plays, concerts and sports with slim admission papers that carry lots of information: event, date, time, price, location, often prettied up with logos, photos or drawings. There’s room for rules of conduct, legal warnings and other fine print that no one reads on the back.

But turning a Canadian prime minister 90 degrees and into, say, Tom Longboat will cause a backlash from traditionalists, said Duncan, one half of international design firm Dowling Duncan. He received “a lot of hate mail” after winning the fantasy contest run by New York-based creative design consultant Richard Smith from people offended that Obama was featured on the fantasy currency.

“But the response made us realize that people in the U.S. are really passionate about what their money looks like and they don’t want it messed with,” Duncan said.

He said he likes Canadian bills because they’re bright and modern. If he had to redesign our printed stuff, he said heritage would be his inspiration.

“The maple leaf — then the Mounties. That’s your identity, in a way.”

Something even a vertically thinking artist will take to the bank.