MonoLisa – A new monospaced font for devs
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. Today, we're launching a new monospaced font called MonoLisa (https://monolisa.dev) to the public. After Marcus saw me (Juho) and Andrey working, he was curious about the fonts we use. In programming, we're stuck with the monospaced format as code has to align to a grid in order to be readable. For a font designer, that's an interesting constraint as you'll have to make compromises to fit the format.…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
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. Today, we're launching a new monospaced font called MonoLisa (https://monolisa.dev) to the public. After Marcus saw me (Juho) and Andrey working, he was curious about the fonts we use. In programming, we're stuck with the monospaced format as code has to align to a grid in order to be readable. For a font designer, that's an interesting constraint as you'll have to make compromises to fit the format. 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. 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: * Design characters such as m and w to be more readable. * 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. * Put more emphasis on terminals (the ends of a glyph) to make sure they are both distinct and they flow to each other. Although the font is a little bit wider than what you might have been used to, in practice it'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. Now, after a year of effort and collaboration we'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://monolisa.dev. Feedback is welcome (comment below or send us mail, [email protected])- I hope you enjoy using the new typeface!
Does the same job
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- MVMonolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creativesJun 2026 · monolisa.dev · ▲190
Originally we (Andrey, Marcus, Juho) built MonoLisa in 2020 as we realised there's room for a better monospaced typeface for developers. The key insight was to make the glyphs slightly wider to make more room for design to make letters like m feel less cramped. Since then we've released a variable v2 (2022) and now we're happy to expand the typeface with a new family called MonoLisa Text. The reasoning was to cover *other* use cases beyond coding with this proportional font. We hope you give Monolisa a go as there's a free trial to try. We also welcome feedback!
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