Turkish Lira

Göran Söderström

Have you started updating your fonts with the turkish lira yet? I’m doing a version update of Siri anyhow, and decided to include it. It sure would be fun to see more examples of the turkish lira from your typefaces, so please show them here if you’d like.

Here’s my first sketch:

Ben Blom

From an upcoming typeface...

Lucas Leo Catalano

Roughs for two typefaces I'm working on. Excuse to lack of context.

Craig Eliason

Lucas, is the slope of the stem something characteristic of the typeface, or something just for this glyph?

Lucas Leo Catalano

Craig, the sloped stems are a characteristic of the typefaces. The bottom left is taken from their respective 'b's.

Thomas Phinney

The Turkish lira, in context of some other currency symbols, in a typeface I am working on.

Jan Tonellato

From a family I’m working on.

PabloImpallari

I'm using the /currency slot for Bitcoins in a current project (Encode Sans).
And keeping the original in .ss01, just in case...

George Thomas

I'm adding Bitcoins also. I think it will be useful.

Ray Larabie

James Puckett

Don’t rush into the bitcoin future. The finite supply of Bitcoins makes them terribly prone to deflation. So in the long run they’re not terribly likely to serve much purpose other than keeping tech journalists occupied.

Craig Eliason

But if people are writing about Bitcoins, then the availability of the symbol has value, no matter if the currency does or not!

James Hultquist-Todd

As the Bitcoin community has yet to reach a consensus as to what the symbol should be I wouldn’t draw anything yet.

Mark Simonson

I wouldn't hijack the currency symbol for it either. People who actually use it and people savvy about stylistic sets is probably nearly an empty set.

John Hudson

James, unlike decimal or similarly structured currency, Bitcoins are arbitrarily divisible. You can purchase something for e.g. 0.00005 BTC. This makes the finite limit on the total possible number of Bitcoins irrelevant to their valuation.

Mark is right that it is a bad idea to hijack the generic currency placeholder character -- or any other standard Unicode character -- for the Bitcoin symbol. If a symbol is standardised for Bitcoins, then there's a good chance it will get proposed to Unicode and eventually encoded. Personally, I think all currency symbols are stupid, and it would be great if the Bitcoin community, unlike the Indian and Turkish governments, were to decide that they don't need or want a symbol.

Max Phillips

Personally, I think all currency symbols are stupid…

Why? Isn't $ clearer and more efficient than USD, for instance?

PabloImpallari

Don’t rush into the bitcoin future. So in the long run they’re not terribly likely to serve much purpose other than keeping tech journalists occupied.

Bitcoins are used by money brokers to shuffle money around without any government or bank control.
This anonymous and tax-free qualites makes them valuable, regardless of the exchange rate.
I guess long-term success will depend on the ability of Bitcoins to remain independent of government controls.

John Hudson

Isn't $ clearer and more efficient than USD, for instance?

Not clearer, because when I see $ I can only rely on context to know whether it means USD or CAD. Around the world, the same symbol is used for dozens of currencies (not all of them dollars). As someone who works with clients and associate designers around the world, I've come to the conclusion that currency symbols are only of local relevance, so maybe not 'stupid' but of severely limited use in a globalised economy. The recent adoption of official currency symbols by India and Turkey seem to me to accentuate the essential parochialism of currency symbols, because what are claimed to be signs of mature emergence on an international stage are really political symbolism for domestic consumption. The real measure of the economic power of these countries in international markets is recorded, for clarity and efficiency, with three-letter codes.

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Ben Blom

The global world of text is full of 'parochialism'. How about eth, thorn, and tons of diacritics? If the US can have $, the Euro countries can have €, the UK can have £ — then countries like Turkey and India can have their own currency symbol too. Too bad for font designers without time on their hands who have to add these new currency symbols to their fonts — but that's another story.

John Hudson

Don't get me wrong: I'm very much in favour of localism, and of organically evolved signs and symbols making their way into standard use. But that's not the context in which governments of what The Economist calls 'developing markets' decide to introduce official currency symbols. The irony is that precisely the developments of globalisation that recommend the precision of the unique three-letter code system spur some governments to these symbolic gestures. The Indian rupee and the Turkish lira have both been around for many decades, and the local users of the currencies have managed without these symbols.