Design the new Caribbean guilder symbol.

On 1 January 2012 Curaçao and St. Maarten (since yesterday 2 islands of the former Netherlands Antilles) will introduce the new Caribbean guilder as their national currency. This new currency needs a new symbol. In recent years there have been some new monetary symbols introduced. Most notably the Euro in 1996, Hryvnia in 2004, Rupee in 2010. This has shown that the introduction of a new currency symbol is a delicate moment. Fingers crossed. Let’s wait till the first committee fucks up the introduction of the new Caribbean guilder symbol.

If the government doesn’t manage to introduce a successful monetary symbol for its new currency, people will just write the currency at length (eg. 24,50 Cmg). Honestly, how often do Europeans still write (by hand!) 24,50 Euro instead of €24,50 just to avoid confusion?

Current fashion could quickly cause that the new currency symbol would look like “something + 1 or 2 horizontal bars”. But is that really necessary? Here is a sketch of a combined ‘c’ (caribbean) with a ‘ƒ’ (florin):

But even more important: whatever it looks like, you have to able to write this new symbol with your big toe in the sand (ũ Kurt Weidemann). Rough, small, quick and dirty, the symbol should survive. Even when written by a local barkeeper on the back of a beer mat, drunk as he is:

Hopefully this issue will draw enough attention, despite of the fact there are substantially less users of this currency than the Rupee. How predictable will it be? Let’s wait till the new official committee meets for the first time (men only). Let’s wait for the public contest of the authorities. Let’s wait for the shadow-contests of typophiles, wait for @fontblog’s call for submissions, wait for type designers’ comments in international media, wait for the offical presentation followed by tons of critique. And then let’s wait for the moment we discovered we could have done better.

Kuantu e ta kosta? See you in 2012.