FontDiscovery 🖼️ 115: Our Favorite Monospaced Fonts for Coding & Branding ✨
& What's going on at Typogram!
Hey Everyone👋
Hope you had a wonderful week so far. Apologies for the newsletter being a tad bit late! This week, I sent out our 12th product update. I can’t believe it’s already no.12.
In July, we worked on adding in-app tutorial videos to help users find our features easier and streamline how to get a brand name change inside the app. This month, we also spent a lot of time thinking about the future of Typogram, especially our software design philosophy.
We are currently reworking our app from the ground up with a brand-new direction to product thinking: modular steps and shareable work-in-progress. The new Typogram maintains the same brand design philosophies and workflows but is more modular and flexible. We broke ground on this new app direction with Typogram’s first step—Brand Personality!
Once completed, the Brand Personality step will function as a modular component that can either stand alone as a mini app or serve as a segue to the full Typogram experience with a more visually stunning presentation you can save and publish.
Our plans for the future: every single step is a standalone app, much more robust, but at the same time, it is still part of the full Typogram experience. The brand design journey can start anywhere and in any order. The work product of each step is presented in a much more visually-impressive way, and you can save and share with your team or community to get feedback. I can’t wait to share more once we are ready, meanwhile if you want to read more about what we were up to this month, check out our product update here.
This week, enjoy the best of monospace fonts, perfect for your coding or branding needs!
In this Issue...
Fonts of the Week: Noto Sans Mono, IBM Plex Mono, Xanh Mono, Space Mono
Design Idea: Low Code/No Code
Color Inspiration: Tegenungan Waterfall, Indonesia
Fonts of the Week
All About Monospaced Fonts
We have covered monospaced fonts many times in this newsletter. Some are a part of an extensive font family, some standing strong on their own. One thing is for sure: Many of you love monospaced fonts because some of these issues are our most popular!
Noto Sans Mono
We covered Noto recently. It is a joint project by several big tech companies (Google, Adobe, and Monotype) to eliminate “Tofu,” which is the box that shows up when there is a missing character. Taking the neutral tone and style elements from the Noto Sans, Noto Sans Mono is neutral and inviting. The monospaced version of Noto Sans is also available. It has several weights and italics for you to use. And you can toggle ligature if you need to.
Details
Humanist sans serif influence (calligraphy)
Numeric “0” with crossbars to differentiate from letter “O”
IBM Plex Mono
Like Noto Sans Mono, IBM Plex Mono benefits from being in a large font family: it has several weights and italics. Plex is extensive because IBM originally commissioned it as its brand font. IBM wanted to illustrate the themes of humanity and machine. The font mirrored this brand vision by having neutral and balanced weights with more friendly italics. Compared with Noto Sans Mono, IBM Plex Mono feels more “rigid” with serifs on the letters.
Details
Curved tails in “l,” “z,” and “Q” for monospace italic
Dotted numeric “0” to differentiate from the letter “O”
Xanh Mono
Xanh Mono (issue 36) is a unique monospaced font. It spices up the idea of monospaced fonts with its pronounced serifs and ball terminals that I haven’t seen in others. It brings an extra sense of elegance and grandeur to designs as a display font for headers. As a coding font, I think it’s an acquired taste. Because of its large serifs, I find Xanh Mono uncomfortable to stare at them for hours when coding. However, if you want to spice up your editor, give it a try.
Details
Transitional serifs with ball terminals
Only one weight with true italic
Space Mono
While monospaced fonts sound techy and nerdy, they also appear intimate and friendly in specific contexts. Reasons could be the extra comfort to our eyes brought by its fixed width or remembrance of memories past when we click-clacked our thoughts to our loved ones. Either way, monospaced fonts are having a comeback. People love using them in their brands.
Space Mono is an excellent example of this. It is a cute, eclectic, friendly monospace font combining geometric perfection with the human touch. The shapes of the letters are very geometric but with a funky calligraphic influence of grotesque sans serifs. Human touch like these makes Space Mono perfect for friendly tech brands.
Details
Geometric, almost retro-looking letters with funky calligraphic influence
Dotted numeric “0” to differentiate from “O”
Design Idea of the Week
No Code Success
We are featured in No-Code Success newsletter this week for our work on Typogram. Check out our interview!
Typography Jargon Buster!
Monospace
First seen around 1950
A monospaced font is fixed width, meaning all its letters and characters have the same width and occupy the same horizontal space. Monospace fonts are used in code editors and science periodicals, in addition to many others.
Thank You
Thank you for reading and hanging out here this week! Please find the fonts here: Noto Sans Mono, IBM Plex Mono, Xanh Mono, Space Mono. See you next week!