Want to get a sense of any best practices of using the "$" dollar sign in the context of an image in order to depict a universal idea of money.
UPDATE:
My task was to create an icon/graphic used in an e-commerce checkout process which depicted the idea of an 'invoice'. It had to make sense in a global context (not just USD). Here is the exploration I had done:
And here is the icon I ended up picking (without a symbol):
Thanks for all the insights and weigh-ins everyone offered. VERY helpful!
It may very well be universally understood but I would be concerned (or at least keep in mind) the user's reaction to this symbol. Would a Russian (a patriotic Russian) be happy to see money be symbolized by the US dollar?
Is there any chance that he may think poorly of your site / app for using the dollar sign?
I don't know your customer base but at first blush I think this would be a concern - not that the $ sign is (or is not) universally recognized - but whether it is understood and appreciated as a symbol of money in general.
Context matters a lot here.
Like others mentioned, localization and your primary userbase should inform you whether to use $, €, £ or ¥ as 'standard' symbol. It might also be possible to do a location-check (via GPS, or IP) and display whichever icon is most appropriate.
If you don't know your userbase's location or currency, you could choose to go with ¤, which is the official stand-in symbol for unspecified currency. However this relies on them being informed enough, and as such wouldn't be advisable on a site for regular Joes.
But beyond that, it depends on what you're depicting. If it's about invoking the idea of money, you could combine the $ with other elements, for instance placing it on a bag to indicate you're not talking about a specific value. But be wary of using just the $ on its own as it is likely to be misinterpreted as actually meaning 'US dollar' instead of the broader "money".
Alternatively you can go for a more pictorial approach and show some bills and some coins. Even if you use green bills that look like USD bills, not using the actual $ symbol could prevent anti-US people from having negative associations.
Surely the best symbol for currency that will be universally understood would be a note and coin as every currency uses both paper notes and coins most currencies use banknotes and coins.
Given this is a simple symbol for "currency", agnostic to culture, the great majority wouldn't have heard of cryptocurrencies, and may have once heard of Bitcoin so they wouldn't need to be represented to be understood by the vast majority.
Also, whilst many of use credit / debit cards for most transactions, we are still acutely aware that we can have cash, use it for transactions and no doubt still have some various notes and coins in a pockets / wallets at any given time.
Be sure to remove any currency symbol, and you're good to go.
Something like (without the Wikipedia text and people images):
Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Money_Coin_Icon.svg
Historically, this question has been debated for quite a long time.
There is a "Generic Currency Symbol," which looks like "¤" which has been used since at least 1985, where it was included in ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1). In theory, that is the symbol you want. However, I have never seen it used outside of reading about the code pages themselves, so that just goes to show the challenges we face with currency symbol.
The answer is simply
and it's surprising there is so much humming-and-hawing about it here.
It's an extremely US-centric idea, it's "just silly" if you will. Indeed the dollar symbol is often used in say political cartoons, financial cartoons, very much as a symbol of the US broadly.
If (for some reason) you wanted to use one symbol, you'd probably use the planet's main international currency, the euro, which is used by about twice? as many people as the USD, and of course in a dozen+ languages. (Of course, the Chinese Yuan is used by far more people than the Euro, and if I'm not mistaken there are now more net-users in China than anywhere else.)
(Oh - it turns out the the number of net users in China is double the US population ... again, another point suggesting it's "a bit silly" to use the dollar symbol.)
Moving on to a more positive note, what symbol should you use:
It seems quite common to use a melange of various major currency symbols:
Or, use "notes and coins" style icons ...
Or, use "bullion bars" style icons ...
There's three great choices, I think those are the main three choices open to you in developing an icon.
Lots of people have given good reasons. I don't think you'll get many Russians growing too irate at the $ sign but it is an interesting thought.
Another possible problem with the $ sign is it could lead people to thinking costs are in dollars. Which dollars is this? It needs to be clearly said or else you could get a particularly ignorant Australian not realising that this site could possibly be using another sort of dollar and thinking he's found a real bargain.
A standard that I've seen around is to have a combination of currency signs. $¥€£ gives you a decent cross section of the global economy with some recognisable signs. This I think clearly says money in general without leading people down an avenue of getting stuck on thinking about one currency.
I'm from a country that is not using dollars as a currency. Creating an app depicting money using $$$ symbols would be silly. I mean if you are 10 years old, making an app for friends, then go for it. But if you are a professional and don't want other people laughing at it simply forget about it.
Depicting money as green bills or gold coins would be OK, even if we don't use green bills or gold coins.
To non-dollar users, the '$' is understood as a foreign dollar of some kind, just as the Netflix icon for many people in the world gets recognized as the universal symbol for a movie that is "not available in [their/your] region".
You can say "patriotism" is the cause (as the accepted answer seems to have), or you can say pavlovian training is the cause, but both symbols have evolved to mean that comprehensive localization wasn't done, that it's probably not going to work for non-'$' users or non-netflix regions, and that those users may waste their time if they click on that button (when they could be using that precious time instead watching the latest cute cat videos).
Anyway, my point is that localization is important, especially for an invoicing system. It's not just the currency symbol that needs to be localized, it's also the punctuation. 1,000 Euros may mean 1000 Euros to you, but to a French person, that comma means that amount is just 1 Euro. And don't even get me started on VAT (Value Added Tax) or Sales Tax depending on where you are located and various other factors. And other cases still, it could also mean that the credit/debit card from your own home country is not going to work.
So if the localization work hasn't been done (except for the simplest of cases), as this is what is being implied by your assignment from your boss/client, then yes, you might as well use that icon. It will send the right signal on what to expect to a prospective user. And this is fine. I don't mean to say that generic non-localized solutions are not fine.
On the other hand, if you management/client decides one day to make an effort in localization, then use an icon overlayed with the appropriate UTF-8 currency (or use an icon overlayed with another partially transparent icon). In other words, treat it like any other button, do not hardcode the localized symbol with the image together, just overlay one on top of the other.
Thankfully, our technology has advanced to such a point that the average user won't be able to notice that the final composite icon was assembled at installation time, or at the last second, just for him.
Aside from the localisation issues, ¤, $, £ etc. are symbols of currency, not money. Since the stated goal is to create an icon depicting an invoice, how about simply using a basic calculation, for example:
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
or simply
Bills and coins are varied and not even universal, and not what's being used here anyway. But, isn't the credit card format a true international standard?
An image depicting a bank card including the distinctive font used by the embossed digits, and the smart-card chip, would be indicitive of the use-case where such an artifact is about to be used in fact.
You could make it localizable. Implement a region specific icon and use the local currency symbol. Then changing the symbol to the right currency is just another step in translating the app.
It may still be interesting, if this should depend on the language or region setting, though. I am not sure, if a European citizen currently being in USA want to have a Euro or Dollar symbol.
There is a universal sign called Currency Sign ¤.
The symbol was first encoded for computers in 1972, as a replacement for the dollar sign in national variants (ISO 646) of ASCII and the International Reference Variant.
My task was to create an icon/graphic used in an e-commerce checkout process...
The problem with the icons you've considered is they look like they could refer to a spreadsheet report generation tool.
Most shopping sites now use a shopping cart icon to refer to checkout.
