Click here to try the font.
Orelega (pronounced in English: /ˌɔːrəˈleɪ̯ɡə/, in Esperanto: /oreˈleɡa/) is a whimsical Clarendon font with oversized ears. Its design was based on Sagona Extra Bold by René Bieder (available on MyFonts), but it is not a shameless copy. Everything has been redrawn from the ground up, with many new aesthetic changes in letterform, such as:
- Latin:
- the completely slabby serifs without round corners, except for very large serifs in “E”, “F”, “T”, and “Z”
- the cursive-inspired “Q”
- the more traditional Clarendon “R”
- the (relatively) open apertures on “c” and “e”
- the consistently even-bigger ear on “g”
- less clashy ligatures, even with accented “i” (e.g. fì)
- international: full coverage of Latin Extended-A letters, plus «ɑ ∃Əə Ǫǫ Șș ẞ Țț Ʒʒ»
- German: more contemporary Sulzbacher (“3”-like) “ß” (plus the new capital “ẞ”)
- Turkish: clear difference between “fı” and “fi” ligatures
- Dutch: accented “IJ” and “ij” ligature substitution (requires Dutch language setting)
- Symbols:
- the fancier “&”
- the uninterrupted slash
- the completely original and even bigger-eared diacritical marks (like cedilla, tilde and ogonek).
- Cyrillic (not supported by Sagona):
- swashy ascender on «б» and swashy descender on «ц щ» inspired by Alice by Cyreal
- traditional curly diagonals for «Жж Кк Яя» and trapezoidal flat-top form for «Дд Лл»
However, it lacks many extra features of Sagona, like full weights, italics, swash letters, small caps, all-caps alternates, and other stylistic alternates.
Orelega is Esperanto for “large-eared”. It is composed of orel(o)- “ear”, -eg- [augments degree or size], and -a [adjective ending].
Because I cannot afford Glyphs, Orelega is developed on the free font editor FontForge. Simply load the project in the directory /fontforge/ and edit there.
To export to a font file, open the project and navigate to File > Generate. Then on the dialog box, choose your file name, save location, and format, then press Generate again.
- kerning is imperfect
- regular weight has been drawn, but not assembled as a font file (In progress at branch
regular-weight)
