[3] Final conceptual designs were created by Canadian Bank Note Company, British American Bank Note Company, and De La Rue, the latter being the first foreign firm involved in the design of Canadian banknotes.
The dates stamped on the banknotes represent the year in which the original intaglio plates were produced for that denomination.
[11] The most prominent designer for this series was C. Gordon Yorke, who engraved the portraits of Robert Borden and Wilfrid Laurier and the vignettes for four of the seven denominations.
[13] A tugboat is prominent in the foreground of the vignette on the reverse, which depicts the Ottawa River with a broken log boom with Parliament Hill in the background.
[5] The reverse of the $2 banknote features a scene of six men of an Inuit family preparing their kayaks for a hunt, based on a 1950s photograph of Joseph Idlout and his relatives taken at Pond Inlet in Baffin Island by Douglas Wilkinson.
[14] It depicts a salmon seiner in the Johnstone Strait, a channel along the northeast coast of Vancouver Island.
[17] An updated version was issued in 1979, for which the serial numbers were moved to the bottom centre of the reverse and the central obverse guilloché was modified.
[18] A scene depicting the operations of Polymer Corporation in Sarnia, Ontario is on the reverse, chosen because the Crown corporation had "achieved a world-wide reputation" and the image "provided detail ideally suited to engraving", according to a Bank of Canada memorandum.
[18] In a Toronto Star article in 1990, Christopher Hume stated that the image of the petrochemical plant on the reverse was the most notable example of the dismal scenes of the series.
The portrait on the obverse is of William Lyon Mackenzie King,[5] based on a photograph by Karsh and engraved by Gunderson.
[20] The reverse depicts a dome formation from the Musical Ride of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
[21] The vignette was suggested by Sterling Suggett, a researcher and banknote designer employed by the Bank of Canada, to honour the RCMP's centennial in 1973[6] and was based on a photograph taken by Donald K.
[6] Originally, the vignette was to depict a frozen lake based on a photograph taken near Sudbury, Ontario, but it was rejected because the orange ink had a limited tonal range.
[22] A photograph from a National Ballet of Canada performance of Swan Lake that had been proposed for the $1,000 banknote was chosen instead as the well-proportioned scene provided "an opportunity for truly virtuoso engraving".
[22] A proof engraving was prepared by George Gunderson using slate gray as the dominant colour, but disappointed with the result suggested using "a shade between orchid and claret".
[11][20] In 1984, the Bank of Canada changed the printing process used for printing the reverse of each banknote, using only lithography instead of the steel engraving and lithography that had been previously used, and continued to be used for the obverse[23] This resulted in a smoother reverse and "slightly sharper" obverse.
Offset printing could not accurately reproduce the range of tints complementing the dominant colour of the banknotes, resulting in a dramatic reduction of counterfeits in circulation.
[29] By 1989, the Bank of Canada had sold over 50,000 uncut sheets of the $1 banknote, each containing 40 notes with sequential serial numbers.
[31] Acceptance of the loonie was initially poor, so banks and retailers continued to conduct transactions using the banknotes.
[30] The city of Hull in Quebec purchased the tugboat depicted on the $1 banknote, named Missinaibi, which is now housed behind the Canadian Museum of History beside the Ottawa River.