Orelega (pronounced in English: OR-ə-LAY-gə) is a heavy slab-serif font with large “ears”—which are, typographically speaking, the stroke on the top right of the lowercase “g”. Orelega’s exaggerated, antenna-like ear seems to perk up to hear what you just said. Other glyphs have similarly large ball terminals, such as “c”, “f”, “G”, “J”, “Q”, “r”, “y”, “2”, “5”, “$”, “£”, “€”, and “&”. Orelega blends the time-tested dignity of Clarendon with playful features, reminiscent of children’s picture books frequented by Century Schoolbook.
The design and proportions were most strongly influenced by Sagona Extra Bold by René Bieder, which I first saw in You Don’t Know Jack: Full Stream. However, Orelega also breaks from its influence in many ways, such as removing the rounded inside corners of serifs (except in very large serifs in “L”, “F”, and “T”), giving the “Q” a new cursive-inspired tail, and designing a new “&” from the ground up.
Orelega supports a wide range of Latin and Cyrillic characters, giving it a relatively wide language coverage.
- the slab serifs without round corners, except for very large serifs in “E”, “F”, “T”, and “Z”
- the cursive-inspired “Q” tail
- the more traditional Clarendon “R”
- the (relatively) open apertures on “c” and “e”
- the even-bigger ear on “g”, with diacritics adjusted to dodge it
- “fi” ligatures formed with forms of “i” with diacritics (e.g. fì)
- 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 from the sequence “ÍJ” or “íj” (requires Dutch language setting)
- a fancier “&”
- an uninterrupted slash
- redrawn and even bigger-eared diacritical marks (like cedilla, tilde, and ogonek).
- exists — not supported on Sagona
- full support for Ukrainian and Serbian Cyrillic
- 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 (/oreˈleɡa/) is Esperanto for “big-eared”. It is a regular compound word, composed of these three morphemes:
The “One” was added to the end of the name by the Google Fonts team, and it denotes that this font comes in one weight only, which is not the Regular weight.
Other Google Fonts with a name ending in “One” tend to be very bold or very thin. Due to its thickness, Orelega One is best suited for subheadings and logos, and may cause fatigue when used for body text (like this). If I were to update Orelega to add a Regular weight, Orelega One would soon be withdrawn from public availability and replaced with a new font named just Orelega.
One example of a font that was updated in this exact way is Fredoka. It was first published as Fredoka One in a single bold weight in 2015. It was removed from Google Fonts in 2021, replaced with a variable font Fredoka with a weight range from 300 (Light) to 700 (Bold) and a width range from 75 (condensed) to 125 (expanded), with “Fredoka Bold” being equivalent to “Fredoka One Regular, width 100”.
This compound word has been used by at least one other Esperanto speaker before: specifically Andy West (Andreo Ŭesto), who used it his blog The Dismey Post (La Poŝto Dismeo) to describe Bing Crosby, the singer of White Christmas:
Dank’ al iu orelega kantistiĉo de la 1940-oj, iksmaso estas asociita inter usonanoj kun multan neĝon, kvankam dum pasintaj jaroj la decembro estas[sic] varma kaj malseka. (source)
Thanks to a certain big-eared male singer of the 1940s, Xmas is associated among Usonians with lots of snow, even though during past years December is[sic] warm and wet.
The Esperanto word for “ear”, orelo, derives from French oreille (“ear”), which is in turn derived from Latin auricula (“ear”). Therefore, it is related to:
- English: auricle or auricula (anatomical word for “the external part of the ear”) and aural (related to hearing)
- Spanish: oreja and aurícula (“ear [auricle]”)
- Portuguese: orelha (“ear [auricle]”)
- Italian: orecchio (“ear”)
And because the base form of auricula is auris, and auris ultimately derives from Proto-Indo-European *h₂ṓws, it’s also distantly related to:
- Proto-West Germanic *auʀā (whence Old English ēare, whence English ear; whence German Ohr; whence Dutch oor; whence Yiddish אויער)
- Ancient Greek: οὖς (whence Modern Greek αφτί)
- Old Church Slavonic: оухо (whence the word for “ear” in most if not all Slavic languages)
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