The Datalegreya font
While I was looking for a cool font to use, I have come across Datalegreya. I really like its original look, and the idea of using ligatures and contextual alternates to add another layer to characters is really intriguing.
Datalegreya is based on Alegreya Sans SC, a beautiful sans-serif small caps font. The interesting twist is the use of character combinations such as d|2a|1t|3a|2 to overlay a line chart (or a variation of one) onto standard characters. You can try this on Font Library itself.
The basic format is as follows:
- Type the character you want to style, for example
d. - Add a combination of
|(pipe) and a number between 0 and 3 to determine the height of the line after it crosses the character (by default it starts with 0 before the first character). - Continue until the end of the text.
There are other features including the x-axis and y-axis legend, a min/max value indicator, and neutral spaces, all described in the README file included with the fonts.
If you plan to use this font as a Web font, be careful as the OTF files are quite large; anyway, when converted to the WOFF2 format, their size reduces significantly. I am not sure this is a good use of the font, anyway, since the text itself is hardly readable if the font is not correctly loaded for any reason; nevertheless, I find it undoubtedly cool.