Haylurker combines blackletter elements at the bottom of the characters with a unique serif forming a solid line at the x-height.

Haylurker was originally designed, as Shark, for the masthead of The Fish Rap Live!, the alternative student newspaper at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The K and Cyrillic Ж are reminiscent of the legs of a cricket or grasshopper; Blackletter is historically German. Therefore, the name is the direct translation of the German word for grass-hopper, Heuschrecke.

It includes the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, small capitals, and a full set of accented characters.