Introducing Space Mono a new monospaced typeface by Colophon Foundry for Google Fonts.

As designers of type, we most often find ourselves composing a monospaced (sometimes called a fixed-width, fixed-pitch, or non-proportional) typeface in the service of building out the styles of an accompanying proportional type family or type system. It’s about adapting the proportional type’s forms and rules, and discovering how those letterforms behave within fixed limits to give the face new texture and capability. But what if that constraint was embraced? What if we set out to create a monospaced typeface that wasn’t simply an extension, but rather something unto itself?

Weights 1–4 of Space Mono, 2016.

Space Mono — whose name inverts its own typographic classification — is precisely that, a typeface drawn to be innately fixed-pitch that comprises Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic cuts, commissioned for the 2016 update of Google Fonts. This monospace-first, monospace-only brood was hatched in the summer of 2015, on the heels of a sans-serif family called Basis, which we created at Colophon Foundry UK — again, an instance of a proportional-first, monospace-after progression. Included in Basis’s 16-cut system was the most extensive monospaced component we’d drawn to date: a Regular, its Italic counterpart, and Bold and Bold Italic pairings.

Weights 1–16 of Basis Grotesque, 2015.

The monospaced cuts reacted to Basis’s grotesque forms in such a way that they still garnered a grotesque classification. A monospace type, however, doesn’t describe its character or distinctions, but rather its function and construction. And while that construction often dictates form (an ‘m’ may get smushed into its container; an ‘i’ extended outwards with foot and bar), we find it interesting that despite these formal constraints, monospaced type is widely used in editorial settings to give a certain style or feel rather than hit a specific character count or meet a technical limitation.

Comparison of Regular and Mono ‘m’ and ‘i’, Basis Grotesque, 2015.

Delving into this process got us thinking about what monospace means to us as designers: If we drew a natively monospaced typeface as a sendup of or homage to our abstract perceptions of that typographic designation, what form would it take? Maybe instead of trying to optimize explicitly for readability or performance, or capture an amalgamation of monospaced letterforms or attributes, we could instead mine our cultural associations and exploit the limitations of fixed-width type.

Space Mono, Regular, 2016.

So while the click-clack of the typewriter occurred to us for a brief moment (Film Noir!¹ Olivetti! Sottsass!²), the idealized monospace that is closer to our hearts and perhaps more aligned with our cultural touchstones are the displays, monitors, and screens of Speculative Fiction — the imagined or not-yet-real interfaces of our most canonical Sci-Fi films and television programs.

Present / Destination. Space Mono, Regular, 2016.

Most monospaced typefaces are dictated by text-intensive usage at very small point sizes,³ but we were captivated by the possibility of a monospace writ large, as it is in our collective mind’s eye: a few words projected on a large display, rendered in overly simplified, appealingly vague pieces of warning or counsel that only a trained operator understands, all witnessed via screen-within-imaginary-screen, aboard interplanetary vessels and hovering automobiles. Our evergreen touchstone for this notion, despite its proportional construction, is Aldo Novarese’s Microgramma, 1952 (and later Eurostile, 1962), its distinctive uppercase ‘R’ leading the way and subsequently echoed in our own drawing.