I picked up a John Q Adams dollar coin today. It has a nice image of Adams; looking like a character out of Dickens.
The statue of liberty engraving on the obverse has an odd appearance to it though, rather angular, with a few discordant wiggly lines.
Were the dies for the obverse engraved with a reducing lathe as coin dies have been “for over a hundred years”, or are they the product of some newfangled computer etching technique?
In another thread, someone linked to this article from the New Yorker. It mentions that the process is entirely digital. It seems to involve a digitizing tablet for creating the design. The process for making the die is not specified, although I suspect a CNC process is used.
The front of a coin is called the obverse; the back is called the reverse.
It’s not immediately obvious to me which should really be called the obverse. The side with the consistent iconic image and indication of value looks to me like a good argument.
The mint link labels them as panache45 said. They just do it in such a way that it’s easy to misread.