Typophile

Monospaced face that works

rubenDmarkes

So the title says it all. I have an idea for a job I was asked to do and ideally it would require a monospaced typeface. Being a typophile, of course I didn't want just any monospaced typeface; it has to work nicely, as in, it has to make the “monospace” work. Usually the problem lies with wider characters like the M (lc and uc) and with lc F and R, for instance. So I'm looking for something you'd feel comfortable setting a paragraph or two in.

Are there such things?

(If it had small caps, that would be almost perfect; if on top of that it had a sans and serif version, that would be perfect.)

Sevag B. Martouni

Hello Ruben,

Recently I came across Akkurat Mono in print and I really like it. Also, have a look at Fedra Mono which is a part of big family.

SB

Pieter van Rosmalen

Hello Ruben,

Perhaps Nitti fits the job? http://www.boldmonday.com/en/nitti

Pieter

JoergGustafs

Thesis comes to mind
http://www.fontshop.com/fontlist/super_families/thesis/

Nitti is beautiful, Pieter!

Hrant H Papazian

Try Inconsolata.

hhp

Steve_L

No small caps, but a pretty good monospaced font: Alix

Nick Shinn

Panoptica

Riccardo Sartori

Find the right font(s) and give them a graphic monospaced-like treatment.

nina

I would've said Nitti too. And yes Akkurat Mono is nice (hell, it's in Codex)! In this contemporary Swiss-ish corner, you might also want to look at Replica Mono, or FF Magda Clean Mono.

rubenDmarkes

I love you guys… =)

Actually I was being kinda lazy. I drew a blank for a while and instead of searching or remembering I fell back on Typophile. And you delivered!

Oooo, an excuse to use Fedra…
Inconsolata is pretty interesting.
Panoptica could help the idea along great if it had both lc and uc forms for each letter, actually, but it might have too much personality.
And Riccardo's suggestion could work too.

Thank you all kindly for the suggestions!

Nick Shinn

Panoptica could help the idea along great if it had both lc and uc forms for each letter…

There are some unicase faces which have different (optically) sized versions of the same glyph for upper and lower.
Sort of "Unicase with Small Unicase".
But that doesn't really work, as the minuscule forms look too strange as "caps" in mixed case setting, while the majuscule forms just look ordinary.

The whole point of Panoptica is that it solves the inconsistencies in width of a "normal" monospace font by means of unicase design.

rubenDmarkes

(This Salvo Serif kicks ass.)

I had never thought of that, Nick, that mixing monospace with unicase could help correct the problems that usually come along with monospaced faces; makes perfect sense.

Actually, some time ago I started a unicase sans-serif project which I then evolved into something along the lines of what I said about Panoptica, trying to make Uc and lc forms all in a unicase style. Indeed, wasn't easy.

Meanwhile, for other people searching for something similar to what I was looking for, try going through Fontshop's lists of monospaced fonts as well (as I did once I conquered laziness). Very helpful.

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