The design of the coinage of the end of the La Tène period before the Roman conquest shows marked similarities with the stylistic vocabulary, as defined by Jacobsthal, of earlier periods. It appears however that the producers of Celtic coinage were able to draw on three distinct stylistic tendencies. One, pseudo-realist, was inherited from the Greek and Roman prototypes they were copying; the second, synthetic, was founded on the need to convey a message on a circular space of limited size; and the third approach was abstract, in which both form and the accumulation of detail were more important than the message. Using selected examples, an attempt will be made to show that the moneyers of Late La Tène to a lesser or greater extent towards preferred abstraction depending on which civitas was involved and the extent to which its people were already acculturated to the Mediterranean world.