Well, apparently I can't vote in my own Poll, but if I could my vote is for 1.
My background is in branding and design. I’ve helped establish and maintain global corporate identity systems, and I think the Sats Symbol meets every important piece of criteria to achieve world wide adoption and usage.
  1. It is distinct from every other currency symbol and yet it looks like a currency symbol.
  2. It can scale well to any size large or small.
  3. It requires the bare minimum to reproduce.
  4. It looks digital. Pure, straight lines.
  5. It is derived directly from the Bitcoin symbol, as a sat is still part of Bitcoin.
While I think Option 2 is clever, and could also work, there are a few things going against it.
  1. It is too derivative of an existing symbol. Why have it resemble the @ symbol at all. Bitcoin is a new thing, it should have a new visual language.
  2. It does not have great scalability. At very small sizes it will be hard to distinguish between the @ and this proposal. Very large will look oddly proportioned.
  3. It doesn’t reproduce very well. Consider drawing the 2 symbols for a road side stand in Cambodia. Which is going to be easier to marker, and read from the road?
  4. The S with the lines is derived from the $. It is basically $+@. Why do we want any visual heritage from that absolute shitcoin in a brand new symbol in the Bitcoin design language. It also makes it feel more US centric. Bitcoin is for everyone.
I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t move forward adopting the 3 line sats symbol. It should be a unicode character, it should be in phone keyboard layouts, it should sitting right next to the Sats amount in this very website.