data

An OpenType variable font that turns {l:10,40,25,70} into a sparkline via ligature substitution. No JavaScript, no SVG, no charting library. Two axes control density and weight, and the charts inherit the metrics of whatever typeface surrounds them, so they sit inside a table cell or mid-sentence without looking bolted on.

Tufte proposed sparklines as word-sized graphics meant to live inside a paragraph. Twenty years on, someone has made them a typeface.

The obvious caveat: if the font fails to load, your dashboard is a field of curly braces.

Reid Lewis has built a 3D city out of the 100,000 most-viewed Wikipedia articles from the past year: every building an article, every floor a pageview count. It’s inspired by Samuel Rizzo’s GitCity, which does the same trick for repositories. You can click buildings to open the article, or—naturally—fly around in a little plane and blow them up.

A growing set of interactive visualisations from Christian Swineheart that map the internal structure of Infinite Jest—its scrambled chronology, endnote architecture, character networks, etc.