I recently started coin collecting, and until recently, the vast majority of Us coins had a right or left profile of the face. Why is this? Obviously, full face pictures would not be difficult, looking at paper money, and recent Jefferson nickels had 3/4 face engravings. In fact, coins to colonial times also had only half the face showing.
Also, why are most of them facing left?
Some of the Thai coins show sort of in between profile and full face, and that looks odd. There may be some sort of problem getting it right in raised material but not a flat picture like on a banknote.
Given that you can’t really do much with shading on a coin face, it’s actually pretty difficult to have them be full-face.
Wow.
Ten chars.
Ethilrist is right. Full face is more difficult.
This is what Cecil has to say about it.
From here:
Reading this prompted me to check out my notes and coins (Australia). All the coins have the profile of Queen Elizabeth, facing left to right. All the notes have a frontal view of the subject. Interesting.
It’s always been my understanding that a “profile” is, by definition, a side-view portrait of the subject, which kind of limits the engraver’s available choices.
That said, if I rotate my coin just so, I find I can make the subject face up or down, too.
I don’t think the US picks left or right for any particular reason. It’s just artistic whim. ETA: The mint answers the question about why Lincoln faces right on the penny: “The direction that Lincoln faces on the cent was not mandated—this was simply the choice of the designer.”
By tradition, she faces that way because her father’s portrait faced the left. (Edward VIII, had he stayed around long enough to get coins, was going to buck that tradition because he thought the left side of his face looked nicer.)
Another factor is how the coin wears during its years of usage. I have some old coins that are fairly well-worn, but you can still decipher the silhouette. Here’s an example of a very worn coin whose profile is still recognizable. A full-face portrait would wear down to just an amorphous blob.
I don’t think there are any other ways for profiles to face. 
In my experience, just about all coins with heads on them at all have profiles.
The Spanish one euro coin has sort of an in-between of full face and profile, depicting King Juan Carlos: Picture.
They have alternated since Charles 11 in 1660, but before that it gets complicated because the silver coins faced one way and base metal the other.
Lord Feldon has the wrong king above. It is was George VI who is supposed to have chosen to face left because he vainly believed his left profile to be his better side. In fact the coins prepared for Edward VIII, but never officially issued, faced correctly to the right, and by reverting to the left as on his father’s (George V) coins, he was simply following the tradition of reversing the portrait direction of his predecessor.
Those are called three-quarters portraits.
Does anyone remember the right-wing controversy when the Kennedy half dollar was first issued? The profile was facing left, symobolizing Communism, and the designer’s initials, a stylized GR, supposedly looked like a hammer and sickle.
You could have them face up or down.
Actually, we now have three-quarters faces, like Jefferson on the special edition nickle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2006_Nickel_Proof_Obv.png
And some of the Presidential Dollars have been almost full-face.
I don’t know why this was avoided in the past. To my knowledge, about the only full-face portraits on coins were ancient gorgons:
http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=image&fr=yfp-t-900&va=Gorgon+Coins
I wrote a whole book about these portraits, and how they are full-face in almost all ancient art.
I don’t remember anything like that at all.
panache45 gave a very nice example of why:
A Gorgon’s frontal portrait would remain recognizable after that much wear where a human’s frontal wouldn’t quite become an amorphous blob but would be a lot less recognizable than a profile (“person with crown”… “person with crown, maybe different from the previous one or maybe not”…), as well as having the mythological element of being the head’s “reflection” rather than its portrait.
I’m still wondering what “ten chars” means.
It’s filler to meet the minimum post length.
