Euro Sign - Design

Design

The euro currency sign was designed to be similar in structure to the old sign for the European Currency Unit, ₠. There were originally thirty proposals, these were reduced to ten candidates. These ten were put to a public survey. After the survey had narrowed the original ten proposals down to two, it was up to the European Commission to choose the final design. The other designs that were considered are not available for the public to view, nor is any information regarding the designers available for public query. The European Commission considers the process of designing to have been internal and keeps these records secret. The eventual winner was a design created by a team of four experts whose identities have not been revealed. It is assumed that the Belgian graphic designer Alain Billiet was the winner and thus the designer of the euro sign.

Inspiration for the € symbol itself came from the Greek epsilon (Є) – a reference to the cradle of European civilization – and the first letter of the word Europe, crossed by two parallel lines to ‘certify’ the stability of the euro.

— European Commission]]

The official story of the design history of the euro sign is disputed by Arthur Eisenmenger, a former chief graphic designer for the European Economic Community, who claims he had the idea prior to the European Commission.

The European Commission specified a euro logo with exact proportions and colours (PMS Yellow foreground, PMS Reflex Blue background), for use in public-relations material related to the euro introduction. While the Commission intended the logo to be a prescribed glyph shape, typographers made it clear that they intended to design their own variants instead.

The guitar brand Epiphone has a logo that is very similar to the euro-sign.

The euro design featured in the popular font Comic Sans originally had a cartoon eye inside a serif. This was removed because the developer of the font was afraid of legal action from the European Union.