Show the asterisk
On a Bloomberg Terminal, when the number comes up, the argument is over. That is what the subscription actually buys. Not the data, the end of the argument.
Crypto has never had that screen. We are building it, and this is what it looks like.
It’s an asterisk because that’s the job
You stop arguing about a number once you can see what sits behind it: which venue, which interval, when it was last true. An asterisk is the mark that says there is something you need to know before you act. Most of this industry keeps that mark off the screen. We put it on the door.
Every card previews on both grounds, and every file is SVG. The wordmark ships as outlines rather than live text, so the lockups render the same on a machine that has never seen our typeface.
Give it one arm-length of room on every side, which is about a quarter of the mark’s width. Never set it below 16px. The arms taper, so under that the gaps close up and it turns into a blob.
- Rotate it, stretch it, or redraw the arms.
- Add a gradient, a shadow, or an outline. Put it in a container we haven’t shown here.
- Recolor it to anything but our blue, black, or white.
- Reset the wordmark in another typeface, or put it in capitals.
- Use it in a way that suggests we endorsed something we didn’t.
A caveat nobody can read is worse than none
So the color here has to survive being printed in black and white, projected badly, and read by someone who does not see red and green the way you do. One grey ramp with a slight cool cast. One blue. Four colors that mean something. Nothing decorative gets a color of its own.
#FFFFFF#FAFAFA#F5F5F5#F0F0F0#E5E6E6#CCCDCE#B4B5B6#9C9D9F#858789#6F7174#535558#383B3E#2D3033#222529#15181A#2973FF#236DF9#5792FF#C4DAFF#00884F / #009359#CA4C4F / #D55658#AC6500 / #BE6D00#3F73D5 / #497EE0Roughly one man in twelve cannot reliably tell red from green. So a loss on Sharpe carries a minus sign and an arrow before it carries a color. Take the color away and the number still tells you the truth.
Eight colors for charts carrying more than one line. Each one shifts in brightness as well as hue, so two neighbouring series stay apart even after you print the chart in black and white. Past eight lines we change the dash pattern instead. Nine hues is more than anyone can hold apart.
Five hundred numbers on one screen
That is what a market screen actually is. If the digits don’t land in the same columns, your eye ends up doing arithmetic the layout should have done for you. Geist has figures that line up, which is most of the reason we picked it. Headlines are the same face at a lighter weight. A second typeface is one more thing to keep honest.
Both are open source under the SIL Open Font License. We don’t rehost them, so get them from the original source.
When to ask us first
Link to us or quote us in writing. Tell people you build on our API. All of that is fine and you don’t need to ask.
Put our mark on a product, in an ad, or anywhere it reads like we vouched for you, and check with us first. Write to team@sharpe.ai. We usually answer the same day, with the caveat attached.