
Show HN: MonoLisa – A new monospaced font for devs - bebraw
Hi HN, we are Marcus Sterz, Andrey Okonetchnikov, and Juho Vepsäläinen from Vienna. Marcus is a font designer while Andrey and Juho are more on the web development side of things.<p>Today, we&#x27;re launching a new monospaced font called MonoLisa (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;monolisa.dev) to the public.<p>After Marcus saw me (Juho) and Andrey working, he was curious about the fonts we use. In programming, we&#x27;re stuck with the monospaced format as code has to align to a grid in order to be readable. For a font designer, that&#x27;s an interesting constraint as you&#x27;ll have to make compromises to fit the format.<p>Roughly two months after our initial chat, Marcus came back to us with a font he called MonoLisa. It was a starting point for a collaboration results of which you see here.<p>To deal with the size constraint, Marcus did something interesting. Instead of going with the regular character width you see in monospaced fonts, he went 7% wider. The small change has implications for the design because now you can:<p>* Design characters such as m and w to be more readable.<p>* Be more careful with the space. Marcus went for a balanced design so both dark and light part of the font is roughly equal per character.<p>* Put more emphasis on terminals (the ends of a glyph) to make sure they are both distinct and they flow to each other.<p>Although the font is a little bit wider than what you might have been used to, in practice it&#x27;s not a big deal as these days displays are wider as well. I feel Marcus did a good choice there and it shaped the font and it stands as something unique compared to the others.<p>Now, after a year of effort and collaboration we&#x27;re happy to launch MonoLisa after private testing and rounds of feedback. You can test the font online and learn more about it at https:&#x2F;&#x2F;monolisa.dev.<p>Feedback is welcome (comment below or send us mail, info@monolisa.dev)- I hope you enjoy using the new typeface!
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sventibolt
Very tempted to use this it's elegant. I would also challenge you to consider
implementing a specimen that puts some weight on some of the font equivalent
to the dyslexiefont typeface which is great for reading log files.

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notkaiho
This is gorgeous. I really like the "reading flow" consideration.

