In designing Luculent (shown in the original article at http://app.programmingfonts.org/#luculent http://app.programmingfonts.org/#luculent), my approach to was

In designing Luculent (shown in the original article at http://app.programmingfonts.org/#luculent http://app.programmingfonts.org/#luculent), my approach to was to use to reversed slash on the zero. It's somewhat unusual, but I did it precisely to avoid any ambiguity with the letter Ø that you point out. I could also have used a dot instead, but then that starts to look like an uppercase theta, Θ, at low resolutions. Squaring the zero a bit also helps.