So, we’re working on this new Highrise feature that requires currency icons. We’ve been making icons for some popular currencies:
During our currency research we stumbled upon the universal currency sign which is used to denote a currency when the symbol for a particular currency is unavailable. The currency symbol was invented in 1972. I want to invent a symbol!
Armed with this knowledge, we made an icon to represent the other currencies that may not have custom icons:
The currency sign was news to us so we thought it might be news to you. If you already knew, lucky you. If you didn’t, maybe this can fill your “learn something new everyday” quota.
Jay Owen
on 09 Sep 08Interesting. I have definitally never seen it before. Any more tidbits on the new feature?
We just started using Highrise for business and so far it has been a great tool.
Eoghan McCabe
on 09 Sep 08Interesting. That’s news to me too.
To be honest, though, it’s far more likely that the dollar symbol will be synonymous with currency to those that experience it than the universal symbol. The fact that it’s news to you (and now me) should tell you that! :-)
Sean Evans
on 09 Sep 08Strangely, I knew about this character from playing Dwarf Fortress, but had no idea it was universal. My respect for that game just increased even more. :-]
Nick
on 09 Sep 08Something’s wrong with the perspective on the picture. Universal currency symbol is not written on the sheet, but hovers over it with one side.
Ryan Eanes
on 09 Sep 08If I had my way, I would’ve used the Simoleons symbol from The Sims!
krist0ph3r
on 09 Sep 08hmmm…i knew the bit about the currency symbol…i think i had first spotted it in the regional settings dialog in some version of windows. definitely not xp, because i just checked. probably win2000 or win98 :)
Henrik N
on 09 Sep 08I knew it from Swedish non-Apple keyboards, though not its meaning. I always thought of it as the Goatse.cx (Wikipedia link, thankfully :p) symbol…
Andreas Gehret
on 09 Sep 08News to me, too – and a well designed icon. The sad thing is: It will be news to most of the users and won’t tell them anything, right?
Marc
on 09 Sep 08I’ve heard of this before, it’s mentioned in a textbook I have called The Elements of Typographic Style, I think?
Like mentioned above though, since it’s so fallen out of use, the symbol is unlikely to mean anything to 99% of people. It is a nice bit of trivia though. I can imagine it causing people to sweat bullets during final Jeopardy ;)
Another somewhat recent symbol is the Interrobang. I kinda wish that one grew more popular…
Jessicaq
on 09 Sep 08Interesting. The only thing I knew that symbol meant is that it is the symbol for the end of table cell contents in Word if you turn on showing hidden/whitespace characters.
Jason
on 09 Sep 08wait, theres another currency besides the US dollar?
Paul
on 09 Sep 08It looks like Alex from the Clockwork Orange movie, which, interestingly enough, premiered in 1971 and played through all of 1972.
mini-d
on 09 Sep 08It was one month ago when I bought Pennies iPhone app and, when I launched the aplication the Euro signs didn’t appear, I’ve all got was the currency one, but I tought it was an utf-8 rare char when you try to visualize something in a different code.
I’ve mailed the creators and they answered me kindly to set up my international settings but they didn’t told me about that symbol!
Joaquin Cuenca Abela
on 09 Sep 08I read once that this symbol is nothing but a vestige from the cold war, where the URSS pushed for an international symbol for currency instead of the dollar.
As others said, nobody uses it, so it fails to convey the notion of “money” to the user. The closes symbol for that purpose is the dollar.
Eric Fischer
on 09 Sep 08The date is a little off here, I think—the symbol was used as a generic currency symbol at least as early as the 1966 deliberations leading to ISO 646 and ASCII-1967.
Nicholas Molnar
on 10 Sep 08I’m not a designer, but that just looks like a gear. Isn’t an unmarked bill a more universal symbol for currency? There aren’t many countries out there (OK, I don’t know of any) that don’t use paper money. A coin would also work. Any better ideas?
Vernon
on 10 Sep 08We use a set of 9 at streetfolio.com
The other 4 currency symbols are:
kr – kroner R – Rand Rs – Rupee f – florin/florint
ugly
on 10 Sep 08Actually, the symbol was first used in 1943.
Josh Santangelo
on 10 Sep 08I used that symbol in a weird web art project long ago. It’s ¤ in HTML, I believe.
Nice icons though!
haha
on 10 Sep 08get real
Ranvir Gujral
on 10 Sep 08I hope this currency symbol research means there’s some sales pipeline functionality on the way for Highrise. Instant upgrade for our account if that’s the case.
James
on 10 Sep 08Cool icons, but do you really think most people will know what the universal currency symbol means? I’d be more inclined to use a dollar sign.
J-P Stacey
on 10 Sep 08Well, if we’re opting for a particular country’s currency as a nomisma franca then I’d be more inclined to use a yen these days. But I suppose the option is there to adopt the universal currency symbol, like Esperanto and Milton Keynes (thanks, Stephen Fry), to try to nullify such nationalist one-upmanship before it begins.
Incidentally, this article would be both more informative and closer in spirit to its doctype if those currency images had ALT text. I already knew about the universal symbol but had to search elsewhere to work out that the fifth is the Korean Won.
Riddle
on 10 Sep 08Have you thought about making those icons with CSS? I remember that you switched from colorful, graphic Basecamp badges for todos, messages to CSS + text versions in BC 2.0. Why not do the same here, but from start?
Matt Large
on 10 Sep 08I learnt about the symbol a year ago when I was trying to produce a currency details table for a reporting system I was building. I tried to find currency symbols for all the currencies listed in their finance records and couldn’t for quite a lot. For those I used this symbol.
The other thing I had to note in the table for all the other symbols, to make the data safe to use, was whether each symbol is meant to be used as a prefix or a suffix.
philip
on 10 Sep 08What is the signs name? How do you say it – “it costs 20 currency?” or “20 moneys, please?” That would be interesting…
Des Courtney
on 10 Sep 08I’m one of those few people who knew this ahead of time: the character was a standard symbol in the “MacRoman” repertoire before the introduction of the Euro replaced that code point (high-ASCII code 219, or shift-option-2) about the time of Mac OS 8 or 9.l
Andy
on 10 Sep 08It’s also called a ‘sputnik’: http://www.typophile.com/node/34977
Aut
on 10 Sep 08What icon will you use for the Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and the twenty to thirty other currencies that use the ’$’ symbol?
jamie
on 10 Sep 08Aut, I think using the ”$” icon would make sense there.
Nils Jonsson
on 11 Sep 08If we’re talking about rendering currency amounts with a currency symbol, then this iconography stuff is very non-37signals. Rather than creating graphics for this purpose, try doing what major publications across the globe do and use the ISO currency codes?
“10,000 USD” for ten thousand U.S. dollars and “5,000 CHF” for five thousand Swiss francs is both straightforward and standard, and it spells less work for you guys.
My 0.02 USD.
Richard Allum
on 11 Sep 08Salesforce renewal now 30 days late, how long can I wait before having to commit and miss out on the goodness for another year ;-)
Christopher
on 11 Sep 08I learned about this sign because some emacs mode would auto-insert it when the used font had no € symbol to spare.
chexum
on 11 Sep 08Heh, and I learned about it when the listings for ABC-80 BASIC programs in the magazines contained v¤ instead of the C-64 v$ for string variables. It took a while to realize what it actually is though:
ABC-80 keyboard, no $
ZorkFox
on 16 Sep 08If J-P Stacey hadn’t done the research, I’d never have known about the Korean Won, so I agree about the alt and/or title attributes on those images.
I find it interesting that many currency symbols have the double or single line through an otherwise standard letter. And how many use the $ before or after a letter to indicate the country using the word “dollar” for its currency.
This discussion is closed.