As software developers, we always strive for better tools but rarely consider font as such. Yet we spend most of our days looking at screens reading and writing code. Using a wrong font can negatively impact our productivity and lead to bugs. MonoLisa was designed by professionals to improve developers’ productivity and reduce fatigue.
Designing a monospace font is much harder than a traditional, proportional one: being constrained by the same width of all glyphs can result in a boring or unreadable font.
MonoLisa features a few unique techniques that increase the legibility and make it visually pleasant to look at for longer periods of time.
Increased width
Increased character width helped us designing a typeface with more natural, open forms. The shapes are more relaxed creating less eye strain over long periods of time.
Wide
Distinction
Distinction is critical for a good coding font since it reduces ambiguity and helps avoid mistakes that can lead to software bugs.
MonoLisa has a set of glyphs that fit together but at the same time are distinct enough so you can tell them apart.
Space
Monospaced fonts tend to have unevenly distributed dark and light space when compared to regular typefaces. MonoLisa carefully compensates the issue by using unique letter shapes to maintain the balance.
MonoLisa, 14px
Fira Code, 14px
Source Code Pro, 14px
Jetbrains Mono, 14px
Reading Flow
MonoLisa uses open forms and terminals (starting and ending points) that are pointing towards the neighboring letters to let the eye follow the line of text fluently.
Italics
The italics of MonoLisa are not simply slanted versions of the upright font. Some clearly differently constructed glyphs make the difference.
Script
Plus
If simple italics are not enough, there is a script version available.
Coding Ligatures
MonoLisa comes with over 120 specially designed coding ligatures. Ligature is a special symbol that combines two or more characters together so it looks like one token. Ligatures help reduce visual noise and balance white space by aligning special symbols appropriately.
Symbols
MonoLisa was designed with developers in mind. It’s one of the few fonts that comes packed with symbols to use in CLIs including PowerLine.
