

Kenya Shilling Symbol - nknganda
http://arkafrica.com/projects/kenya-shilling-symbol
Proposed Kenya Shilling Symbol
======
cdooh
I'm Kenyan, and I can tell you that I'm not quite clear on whether it is Kes
or Ksh, I use the latter but see Kes used about the place. The symbol they
came up with is great and I can see it being widely adopted(looks very much
like their own logo:-D). Glad to see a story on Africa, particular Kenya, on
the front page of HN that's not about mpesa though what up with the grey on
black page? Poor UX

~~~
muriithi
I just use the ISO 4217 code which is KES.

~~~
cdooh
I learnt Ksh all my life so I assumed it was correct too

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tikhonj
Simple, elegant and distinctive. Certainly the qualities I'd want for a
currency symbol. I also tried writing it out by hand a few times, and it
really is easy and readable.

I particularly liked how they included a blurred picture. Sure, you can't
quite make out the = part of the design, but the general shape (well, it's a
K) is enough.

The one thing I didn't quite like was the variation with a serif. It just
looks a little off. Perhaps the proportions don't quite line up--the parallel
lines are too thin and close together. Beyond that, I'm not sure how to
reconcile a serif with the two lines really close together. This is not to say
it's _bad_ , but I think it could be improved.

It would be really cool to see this actually get adopted. Admittedly, I'm not
_too_ hopeful--concept art side projects like this tend to stay side projects
--but you never know.

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jpatokal
Hmm. I'm not sure this recent trend of coming up with new symbols for
currencies needs encouraging:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_sign](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_sign)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rupee_sign](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rupee_sign)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_lira_sign](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_lira_sign)

From an IT perspective, even the euro sign, finalized in 1996, continues to
cause pain. The newer symbols are even worse: I personally spent several hours
earlier this year trying to get cross-browser rendering of the new Turkish
lira sign without breaking everything in the process. Finally made it more or
less work with this Google webfont, specified as the 2nd preference so it used
the standard font for rendering everything except the lira sign.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14117547/browser-
support-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14117547/browser-support-and-
workarounds-for-turkish-lira-sign)

~~~
arrrg
This seems like an awfully whiny and egocentric opinion.

Look, the world won’t end if sometimes those symbols cannot be displayed. We
do have two or three letter abbreviations for currencies. But in the long it
should be our goal to create systems that can deal with new symbols easily and
that have the assumptions that symbols will change and new ones will be
introduced built into them. Because that’s how it is. Actually.

It seems to me here that in this case it’s very much the web that’s broken,
not the new symbol.

~~~
jpatokal
But what's the benefit or rationale for having a new symbol? As far as I can
tell, it seems to mostly consist of thinly veiled nationalism: "all the big
countries have one, so we need one too". See for example this:

 _Now India wants something that no global economic powerhouse should be
without: an international symbol for its currency._
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7923825.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7923825.stm)

And it's not as if the existing "Rs", "TL", "KSh" etc don't work. So by
introducing a new symbol, the country creates a lot of real problems (not just
in IT, but for everybody who needs to enter or display the new symbol; where's
the " ₹" button on your keyboard?), just for a vague sense of nationalist
pride and prestige.

~~~
axman6
Is there anything wrong with that? If the Kenyan Shilling is as important as
they describe in the article, then why should they have to be stuck with a
second rate symbol using latin letters? Do you think the Euro should just use
$ or EU$ or something else that doesn't convey the fact that the euro is not
called the Euro dollar, but has its own name?

One of the reasons I like using OS X is that, from what I can tell, 99.99% of
developers don't have to worry about this stuff. They let the system handle
text and font rendering, and when the new Kenyan Shilling symbol is adopted,
their apps will render it without having to do any work.

~~~
jpatokal
As it happens, $ is originally the _peso_ sign. When is the US going to stop
using a secondhand symbol shamelessly stolen from the Mexicans?

At the end of the day, you don't need unique symbols to distinguish
currencies, because 99.9% of the time you're only dealing with one at a time
and, for the remaining 0.01%, there are ISO standard codes that are guaranteed
unique. (Unlike "$", mind you.) In Finland, prices at markets were usually
written "5,-" in the pre-euro days, and that perfectly clear notation
continues to be used after the mark was switched to the euro.

~~~
pavlov
The dash in "5,-" simply means that there are no decimals. When you write a
price like this which does have decimals, it looks just like a regular number,
for example "4,99"... And then you may need something to indicate the unit.

The euro sign is a good solution because it resolves the ambiguity of how to
write out the currency unit. Here are some ways how the price 0.99 EUR can be
written in Finnish:

    
    
      0,99 euroa
      99 senttiä
      0,99 EUR
      0,99 €
    

Multiply this by 20+ nations and you get a lot of different ways to write a
price...! Without the euro symbol, there wouldn't be a single reasonably
consistent way to write a price in the Euro zone.

Don't forget that there are countries in the Euro zone that use the Greek and
Cyrillic alphabets. Just the word "euro" spelled out may be unrecognizable if
you don't know the alphabet.

~~~
Robin_Message
The European banknotes have the word "EURO" on them three different ways:
Romance (EURO), Greek (ΕΥΡΩ), and (since 2013) Cyrillic (ЕВРО).

I swear I once saw a picture which was like a Huffman coding table for the
spelling of Europe in every European language, but I can't find it now -
anyone seen it? It started with a big E, and then had U and Y above on
another, and so on.

~~~
Kliment
It's on the energy rating cards that appliances have too.

~~~
Robin_Message
Thanks! That's the one, I remember the coloured bars next to it now, and it's
the word energy, not Europe. See one at
[http://blog.calpeda.com/2011/08/calpeda-
europump/](http://blog.calpeda.com/2011/08/calpeda-europump/)

------
pyre
I'm not sure I understand this:

    
    
      | the mobile money capital of the world
    

The term "mobile" is tossed around so much that I'm not sure what they are
trying to imply here.

~~~
nether
OT but interesting quote syntax, using the code tag and the |. What made you
develop your own quote formatting instead of the standard single angle bracket
(which has precedents in email, Usenet, and Markdown)?

~~~
pyre
To emulate the way that blockquotes show up in most webpages nowadays (offset
to the right with a border-left of some sort). I'll note that mutt accepts '|'
as a quote character in addition to '>' (for highlighting purposes). If you
look through my post history, you'll see that I'm not 100% consistent.
Sometimes I use '>'.

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skc
Thanks, this was great precisely because it's rare to see articles on design
within an African context

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publicfig
This is a bit confusing. I guess the implication (or at least as I found it)
was that this was actually developed as an official project with a governing
body of Kenya, but at the bottom, it appears as if that's not the case. So is
this just spec work, or is it something that actually had backing before the
project started?

~~~
Luc
They state that it's an experiment in the opening paragraph and the sidebar,
but it's easy enough to skip over that. I suppose it's good advertising for
their skills and a way to stay productive in between paying projects?

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vacri
I quite like it, though it does also look remarkably like their logo :)

~~~
xradionut
Yes, I noticed that too...

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mrcactu5
it's a beautiful letter K. will they add it to Unicode?

~~~
mey
I'm pretty sure there is space but
[https://twitter.com/everyunicode](https://twitter.com/everyunicode) will have
to start over.

~~~
jlgreco
They could start an errata series of tweets with the ones they missed when
they finish.

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aneth4
Not to put down the designers here, but how many ways can you take a K and add
an =, which is pretty much the symbol design of every modern currency....

~~~
phreeza
I can think of at least 4: one for each stroke, and 'dollar style' through the
middle.

~~~
aneth4
Hope they spent at least $1M to try all four.

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Terretta
A 20 cent stamp and a four dollar pair of jeans -- subtle recommendation to
ramp up Kenyan clothing imports?

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nollidge
> we'll be looking at ways of improving our nation's image through design

On a page with barely _any_ contrast between the text and background.

~~~
DanBC
Perhaps HN needs a place for meta comments like this. I hated the ridiculously
poor contrast and tiny fonts, especially since the site was created by people
who do know better.

2e2e2e and 787878 is a contrast 3.07:1, which is pretty lousy.

It is weird that they can create a nice little logo-thing, and yet have a
website that's unusable for many people.

I used to think that a designer's website would be some indicator of their
talent, but there's not much correlation there.

~~~
officemonkey
I just assumed that they did that on purpose. "Pay no attention to the text.
Look at our pretty drawings" seems to be a common designer anti-pattern.

~~~
ctidd
Regarding your thought, there's an aspect of design known as typography that
directly deals with easing and encouraging reading. So I'm inclined to say no
-- this is not a common designer anti-pattern -- and to say it is implies the
ideal of the design profession lies with the least capable of its
practitioners.

That's insincere.

May we please demonstrate respect and professionalism when discussing
designers?

Making unsupported assertions about a perceived defect in an entire profession
doesn't seem right to me, but I was very tempted to just write, "'Look at
those dumb designers' seems to be a common developer anti-pattern." I don't
think that sort of comment is necessary.

Thank you for understanding.

~~~
officemonkey
I apologize for any misunderstanding.

People with different backgrounds focus on different things. Some designers
will be do fabulous things on an aspect of typography (turning a K into a
currency sign) and yet make an error with type contrast that impedes reading.

One could infer from that is they don't think what they wrote was as important
as the picture, since they rather intentionally selected a poor contrast
design.

All professions have anti-patterns and all people make errors. Mine was being
a little flip in my tone to show a recurring problem I experience. Yours was
generalizing that criticism of a designer's error is a criticism of the entire
profession.

