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
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.
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.
It might cause pain for the web, but it is pretty routine for other types of software. We added the new Indian Rupee sign to Bloomberg's custom font and at the moment and are integrating it with our hardware.
Having a single currency sign is pretty nice UX for citizens of a country and I'm not sure that countries should be chastised just because they want what those using the Dollar, Pound, Yen, etc have enjoyed for so long. If anything, font designers, font formats, browsers, OS vendors should innovate a bit to make adoption of new characters easier.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 "$", mind you.) In Finland, prices at markets were usually written "5,-" in the pre-euro days, and that perfectly clear notation continues to be used after the mark was switched to the euro.
The dash in "5,-" simply means that there are no decimals. When you write a price like this which does have decimals, it looks just like a regular number, for example "4,99"... And then you may need something to indicate the unit.
The euro sign is a good solution because it resolves the ambiguity of how to write out the currency unit. Here are some ways how the price 0.99 EUR can be written in Finnish:
0,99 euroa
99 senttiä
0,99 EUR
0,99 €
Multiply this by 20+ nations and you get a lot of different ways to write a price...! Without the euro symbol, there wouldn't be a single reasonably consistent way to write a price in the Euro zone.
Don't forget that there are countries in the Euro zone that use the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. Just the word "euro" spelled out may be unrecognizable if you don't know the alphabet.
The European banknotes have the word "EURO" on them three different ways: Romance (EURO), Greek (ΕΥΡΩ), and (since 2013) Cyrillic (ЕВРО).
I swear I once saw a picture which was like a Huffman coding table for the spelling of Europe in every European language, but I can't find it now - anyone seen it? It started with a big E, and then had U and Y above on another, and so on.
In the short term, it's true that it causes some pain, but it does look very much better, and in the longer term it'll work fine.
If browser manufacturers had only ever implemented things that were currently supported, we'd never have got anywhere at all. Progress has a period of pain followed by later benefits.
Wasn't there something I saw about growing support for rendering ligatures automatically? In which case, it seems like you could just use K$ as an encoding and have browsers render it right when they can and wrong but legible when they can't.
What kind of problems have you seen with the euro sign? Are you talking about badly designed free fonts which render terribly and have missing glyphs?
This is not about "coming up with new symbols" - there isn't a current symbol for Kenya's currency. Currencies, country codes and languages are subject to change over the years and our tech should embrace that.
IEC 8859-1 (Latin1) vs IEC 8859-15 (Latin9) is the main bugbear: whenever you see ¤ instead of €, this is the cause, and there's an awful lot of data in and software expecting Latin1 still out there.
Actually the Indian rupee sign needs to be distinguished from the Sri Lankan rupee, the Pakistani rupee, the Nepali rupee.. etc., all of whom use "Rs" (U+20A8) as a prefix[1] The usecase is pretty validated there.
Plus there is a logic to the Indian rupee sign and is not just an alphabet with two slashes - its the letter R written in Hindi and in English simultaneously . Pretty cool IMHO (and a shout out to IIT Bombay [2] !!!)
And why do you think the rupee sign, if successful in India, would not be adopted by the rest as well? "$" is by no means limited to the Mexican peso it was originally intended for.
And yes, I do agree that the rupee sign is a little masterpiece of typography, but that's somewhat beside my point -- the inconvenience of switching to anything is the same.
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)?
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 '>'.
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.
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.
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.
I've tried to design things. They are ugly and clunky and clearly the result of someone with no skill or talent.
So when I see a designer with some years of experience and training and who is capable of producing lovely work but who has a website with a very small font, or with a poor contrast, or with the combination of a small font with poor contrast, I wonder "what went wrong?"
FWIW, I found reading the story quite pleasant. It never even occurred to me that there was any problem with the site until I saw all the complaints in the HN comments.
In retrospect I can of course see the low contrast, but it didn't seem to be a problem in practice.
It also worked pretty well to emphasize the pictures, which really are the main point...
I think that's because the brightness on your monitor is very high. I keep the brightness knocked down since most sites use a lot of white, and I don't like reading off lightbulbs. This blog actually looks nice when I crank the brightness up, but then a site like HN (which is a typical website) looks terrible.
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?
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?
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....
