Monospace Alpha 0.1

A typeface inspired by terminals & typewriters and designed for code

Why another monospace typeface?

In recent years a number of well designed monospace typefaces have appeared. My own favorites include Apple’s SF Mono and Colophon Foundry’s Space Mono. Something I felt was missing however, was a monospace typeface that worked equally well for code as for longform writing and that was also usable at a larger number of sizes.

I wanted it to be a typeface that could equally well be used for engineering a website as for presenting the text on that same website.

I think it is missing some characters?

It might be, Monospace Alpha is still in early development, so if you do find characters that are not included, let me know. I will try to include them in an upcoming release.

Designed using Figma and Glyphs

The basic character shapes for Monospace Alpha were designed in Figma and later refined using Glyphs app. Figma is the design tool I have been part of developing and designing. Part of its feature set are powerful vector editing tools and booleans that make the early stages of iterating on a font design go very quickly. Glyphs app is my favorite font editor. Much like Figma, it has a small but refined tool set that gets out of the way of your own designs.

Is it free?

Monospace Alpha is free to use for now. This minimal version is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) license. I’ll be releasing a version with extended glyphs for the price of a cup of coffee in the future.

Versioning for Monospace Alpha

This is a very early alpha release of Monospace Alpha. Perhaps it doesn’t have all the characters you would expect and it also only comes in one weight. Although I am skeptical about the use of italics in most typography, I recognize that can they serve an importance function in annotating code. I intend for Monospace Alpha to have well drawn italics.

How can I contact you?

For feedback on Monospace Alpha or anything else you can try Twitter (@johanprag). You can also email me at hi@johanprag.com. If you do end up using Monospace Alpha for actual work, let me know!