29 August 2002

Font magazine: The Euro: from logo to letter Great article on the birth-in-bureaucracy of the Euro symbol. Particularly good on Brussels muddling logo and letter in its instructions to the designing/communicating/*selling* industries: Had the Eurocrats consulted a typeface expert, they would not have failed to learn the difference between a character’s graph and its ductus. In a letter — and that's what the Euro sign is intended to be — its skeletal shape (graph) and actual form (ductus) are two different things. [...] It is precisely to this principle that we owe the cherished variety of typefaces — while in appearance they may widely differ, they all are readable. Thus, it would have sufficed had Brussels provided us with a black-and- white sketch and a statement to the effect that the new currency symbol consists of a C-shaped arc crossed by two horizontal bars. That's it! Width, breadth of stroke and execution of the Euro sign should depend on its intended use. [via Interconnected] 12:24:10 AM     comments