Friday, January 22, 2010

My Rupee Symbol Entry in the design contest

As some of you may know our Finance Ministry had announced a contest for designing a symbol for Rupee. This is to replace the current way of writing 'Rs' by symbols like dollar, pound, euro, etc. currencies have.

Since long, I also had wished that our government changes the symbol and was enthused with this announcement. Hence decided to participate and submitted following symbol. Though I had high hopes, it did not get selected for the final five. Felt a bit sad, am human too. Anyway, I wish all the best the finalists.

Here is the Symbol:



And here is the description as per the contest guidelines:

Motivation

Due to my work profile, I have to make extensive use of financial and mathematical software programs spreadsheets (MS-Excel and others).

I always wished there was a symbol for Indian Rupee, just like US$ or Euro - €, etc., but had to settle with the not-so-intuitive ‘INR’ or just avoid selecting currency symbol all-together.

Trigger

The Contest announced by Finance Ministry was the perfect trigger and thought about submitting at-least one design

Design Thoughts

Following were the guidelines I set to myself before starting the design, the symbol:

  1. Should adhere to the Contest Guidelines
  2. Should not be complex
  3. Should be easy to draw in daily use
  4. Should avoid use of ‘Dash’ or ‘Strike-Out’ lines which can imply a cutting or a slashing action and I personally felt it should not be used on our currency!

Explanation of the Submitted Symbol:

Indian History and Culture

The Outer Circle signifies a two fold meaning:

  1. It implies the World, in which our Rupee has to make a mark
  2. It also implies 0 (Zero or Shunya), one of the most important invention that India has given to the world along with the decimal system; without which the financial, mathematical and all other scientific computations would have been highly difficult to do and incomprehensible to most.

Visual Representation in Indian or English Script

The Inner Curve uses both, Devnagari as well as Roman (English) Script for visual depiction of the Rupee word, i.e.:

  1. Part of English Alphabet ‘R’ – which is the start of our currency’s name (Rupee), and,
  2. Devnagari’ letter for ‘ra’ ‘’– again part of and start of the name ‘rupaya’

Advantages of this symbol

Some advantages of this symbol are:

  1. Very Simple design
  2. Can be easily accommodated in to computer systems
  3. Can be easily drawn by people in daily use
  4. Can be drawn in one single stroke, i.e. without lifting the Pen/Pencil. Other currency symbols ($, €, £, ¥, etc.) need the pen to be lifted two or more times
I wish all the finalist the very best.

2 comments:

Pritam said...

I did not know about the compittion, otherwise I would have tried my hands too.. :)
But your entry was creative, Hard luck! I wonder how would be the winning entry.

Viru said...

the announcements showed up as news in papers and news sites.
I am too waiting to see what the winning (or even the 5 final) entries look like. After all, one always feels my own entry was the best ;)

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