Learning to Live With the Euro Glyph By PHIL PATTON Trading in the euro, the first common European currency since the Roman Empire, began on Monday. So far, Europe seems to be proving that it can smoothly draw on euro bank accounts, but drawing the euro symbol on a yellow pad or a computer screen is another matter. The new currency is represented by a symbol the European Union's monetary commission calls the "euro glyph." The euro is the first currency in history designed for electronic transactions. Actual coins and bills won't be used until 2002 -- the euro glyph is a combination of curves and 80-degree angles that resembles a "C" crossed with an equal sign. For ordinary folk, simply rendering the glyph is as much of a challenge as adapting computers to track its value in local currencies. The symbols for most currencies are rooted in history. But the euro glyph was handed down by secretive European Union bureaucrats fully formed, instant and anonymous. The basic shape is clear and recognizable enough. It shares a family resemblance with other monetary symbols, like the dollar and pound, letters made into symbols. The glyph's shape, the European Union officially declares, evokes epsilon, the Greek ancestor of "e" and a tribute to the birthplace of European civilization. The parallel strokes evoke stability. The strokes end in angles that lend dynamism to the shape, as well as a vaguely gothic effect. The symbol is aimed to transcend language and local reference and serve throughout what the monetary commission calls not Europe but "the euro zone" or "euro land." Most computers can't display the glyph. While Windows 98 has the euro glyph in three of its basic fonts, few users will be able to find it. In the current issue of ID magazine, Peter Hall voices the complaints of graphic designers and typographers that the character's design is too wide and too specific to fit computer fonts. A British company called Eurotype sells a euro add-on for Windows to make any key you choose print the glyph. Adobe Systems is devising a glyph for its fonts. The Financial Times has come up with a thinner, more upright version that looks like a seahorse. If the glyph designers were thinking little of computer keyboards, they were thinking even less of the local retailer. Most grocery stores and cash registers use the letters EUR for prices. Computers do the same, and the lack of a glyph key is not a problem for online transactions in the new currency. But consider the vegetable vendor with chalk in hand, scribbling the day's prices for artichokes or arugula. The symbols of and on our money engage in a complex interplay with language, especially slang. We get greenbacks and, from the noble Roman "X" on old $10 bills came the sawbuck and, in turn, the buck. The strange almost cursive-style "L" of the pound symbol comes from Libra, the balance, and suggests the intonations of weight and solidity that make the pound sterling as dear to British hearts as beef or beefeaters. But the euro's references lack this vernacular history. They are conscious and calculated -- it's a post-modernist glyph, as if dreamed up by semiologists from academe. Company logos once commonly derived from some visual element of the business -- a bell or bolt of electricity. The euro arrives with the feel of the logo of a company that comes out of a megamerger or corporate reinvention -- a Lucent or Unisys -- the logo of euro land. But a currency needs a symbol, not a logo, a mark people can scrawl or adapt. The glyph will turn into such a symbol, but only by defiance of the official specifications, just as local and personal differences will survive the templates of the euro zone. Therein, perhaps, lies a model of how the whole new European system is likely to work: rules made continentally, adapted locally.
Books ·
Recent Stories ·
Euroland ·
Webcams ·
Design |
