Portfolio Mono (working title)

Vasil Stanev

Ori Ben-Dor said:

@Vasil Stanev

Ideally I'd offer lowercase-size old-style figures and uppercase-size lining figures as alternatives, but neither satisfies me as default, which is why I've come up with this hybrid approach. I know it's not perfect, but nothing seems to be.

Are you sure it's dull? And I was thinking to myself programmers would probably think it has too much character... Typical coding typefaces are more geometric and have less going on.

What visual balance problems? Please elaborate.

If you stare at code all day, you might begin to feel like a driver looking at the same road markings for a 10-hour drive. A little flair is good, yet it has to be organic and not stand out too much. That's the actual difficult task - make it interesting without distracting from the code.

The balance issues come from the differences in size due to design. The flag of 6 and tail of 9 protrude too much. Keep in mind a type for coders will be looked at at predominantly small sizes, even smaller on a mobile device. Shrink the specimens and you might be surprised. Agree?

Ori Ben-Dor

>> your eyes have gotten so used to certain patterns that a deviation from that looks odd

That's a good point, but still my eyes are all I've got...

/2 is a bit less masculine now, /9 is a little bigger (but not as big as /6). Also made minor changes to /6 and /8.

Thanks @Jasper de Waard for all your comments!

Ori Ben-Dor

Default set vs old-style:

Thomas Phinney

What's the purpose and use case for the font?

Courier New, and this, are both super light for text sizes, IMO.

Ori Ben-Dor

A while ago I had to compose a portfolio, and at one point I considered using Courier New for the accompanying text. Its light color, I thought, would leave the spotlight for the presented works, and as a monospace font, it would feel somewhat inorganic, as if the works and the text belonged to different layers, which was desirable in this case.

In the end I didn't use Courier New, partly because it was probably too light and a bit ugly, but I didn't forget about the concept. As soon as I had some free time, I started working on font featured in this thread. It's very light, but not as much as Courier New, and hopefully it's not as ugly too (of course, it's not just "a little darker and prettier Courier New", but that was the starting point anyway).

To see it in action, I'm attaching a mockup portfolio page (but don't pay too much attention to anything but the accompanying text; I did it just now as quickly as I could).

I know the demand for light monospace fonts is probably not the highest, but that doesn't bother me at the moment. If I ever release it, I'll probably add darker weights.

John Hudson

I've used this approach — what I called 3/4 ranging numerals — as the default style in mixed script fonts, e.g. Devanagari and Latin, or Thai and Latin, where this style coordinates nicely with text in either script.

Cory Maylett

Ori Ben-Dor said:

>> your eyes have gotten so used to certain patterns that a deviation from that looks odd

That's a good point, but still my eyes are all I've got...

There's always the trick many of us learned in our university design classes about turning everything upside down or reversing and flopping it to gain a fresh perspective.

Ori Ben-Dor

@John Hudson
That was my initial motivation too, in case I wanted to add Hebrew support later on.

@Cory Maylett
Yeah, I do that all the time. But you need to use this tool with care, at least in type design. Take for example a typical 8 flipped upside down. The now-top bowl looks disproportionately larger. But that doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem. The same with 6 and 9. Flip them and the 6's bowl will look larger. But that too doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem.

Ori Ben-Dor

So I've reached the milestone of all three planned sets of figures ("3/4", lining and old-style) as well as all(?) basic symbols.