Earlier today Erik Spiekermann made mention of FF Chartwell, and, at least conceptually, it’s pretty fantastic.
Similar to the way icon fonts replace keyboard characters with icons, FF Chartwell uses alphanumeric characters to generate beautiful charts on the fly. To my knowledge, however, this works only in software programs and can’t be embedded in web pages.
Update: It can be embedded. It’s possible to embed it, but the current EULA doesn’t allow it. Demo by Yaron Schoen who says, “Besides the FOUT which was really hard (impossible?) to remove, it was glorious.”
The family includes “weights” for creating bar, line, radar, pie, rose, and ring charts. A simple math equation, such as 10+20+30, is all that’s needed to generate the chart. Each value can be assigned a color, which in turn becomes the value’s color in the chart.
In something such as Photoshop, it’s quite cumbersome to change the values, as you have to enable and disable the OpenType feature to do so. In other programs such as InDesign, this isn’t as cumbersome (as shown in the video above).
Here’s a simple example using Chartwell Rings and Chartwell Lines. The same equation is utilized in both charts:
Conceptually, I love the idea and hope to see this and other fonts expand to include webfont embedding, assuming the data could be represented semantically and accessibly. You can purchase FF Chartwell as a whole or as separate charts, and you can find additional usage examples on the FontFont blog.
