Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives

109 points - last Monday at 2:05 PM


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!

Source

Comments

cyphar today at 12:13 AM
I'm more of a bitmap font guy (at least, as long as my eyes continue to forgive me for it) but I'm always interested to see what other fonts there are around. It does look quite nice.

I must admit when I ran across the second real paragraph from the main page, I couldn't help but only think more and more about how we will look back on marketing copy like this in a decade from now:

AI assistants produce both code and prose. MonoLisa Text renders long-form explanations with optimal readability, while MonoLisa Code keeps your code crystal clear. The perfect pairing for the AI era. (Under the title "A perfect pairing for the AI era.")

Ignoring the deep pit of sadness I felt when thinking about the incredibly long (and revolutionary) history of typefaces that led us to today for just a moment, I'm honestly curious how effective this marketing is. How many people would assume a font would be suitable for general text but not LLM-generated text and would need to be dissuaded from that notion? I wonder if someone has started selling keyboards that are "perfect for prompting" (but I'm too scared to look at this stage).

microflash today at 2:00 PM
Looks interesting.

> The Licensee may not modify, translate, adapt, alter, decompile, disassemble, decrypt, reverse engineer, change or alter the embedding bits, the font name, legal notices contained in the font software, nor seek to discover the source code of the font data, convert into another font format, create bitmaps, add or subtract any glyphs, symbols or accents, or any other derivative works based on the electronic data in this product.

This is why I haven’t bought it. I like to subset fonts to reduce the size. Any font license that prohibits this just gets ignored by me, no matter how good it is.

smcleod today at 1:54 PM
Looks decent but $250 AUD for a font? Even for local and personal use? That's... a lot. I was thinking if it is paid and it was around $25 I'd consider it, then I saw the price!
microtonal today at 6:14 PM
I have used MonoLisa for a few years now as my terminal and editor font and I absolutely love it. It was a fair bit cheaper when I bought it (80 Euro IIRC), but was well-worth it!
warpspin today at 10:36 AM
Seems there's no way to disable the <= ligature without disabling whitespace ligatures? I'm not all too crazy for real ligatures but whitespace adjustments otherwise seem nice.

Also, as it's so finely adjustable, would love if they'd offer some variants for dot and comma, to increase their size, because that's my number one problem with fonts since age 45.

pmontra today at 4:55 PM
> MonoLisa ships as a variable font with two axes. Weight gives you every cut from Thin to Black in a single file — no megabytes per style. Grade fine-tunes typographic color by adjusting stroke thickness without changing glyph widths

If any web page designer reads this, weight 1 and grade -50 is what many web pages look like, or even thinner than that. Weight 300 and grade 0 are the lower boundary of readability IMO.

A free (as money) font with most of those properties is Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, both monospace and variable width. https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

roundcan7998 yesterday at 3:09 AM
Created an account, to come tell you folk, just how much I love Monolisa. Have been using it every since they launched, in both my terminal, and my code editors.

It’s lovely!

editing to add: They even have PPP pricing! Which as someone living in India, I highly appreciate, since it puts a lovely piece of art within reach.

gregrobson last Monday at 4:55 PM
Bought MonoLisa back in 2022, never even considered switching coding typeface since. Before that time I used to switch every 3-6 months.

It's really well balanced easy on the eye.

Amekedl today at 7:57 AM
Looks good. Won't ever buy a font though.
steinvakt2 today at 5:18 PM
Is it possible to get this for free? I know there’s a free option but I don’t understand what the limits are
groos today at 4:58 PM
I call all these new fonts monofonts, mono in the sense of monoculture. Aesthetics practically indistinguishable from each other. Give me one of the IBM Selectric fonts in a modern form and I'll be happy as a clam.
melody_calling last Monday at 9:27 PM
I adore MonoLisa, thank you for all the effort that's gone into making it and congratulations on the new release!
veidr last Monday at 3:27 PM
I love this font. I think it is probably the only coding font I have ever actually purchased.
SpyCoder77 today at 12:46 AM
Absolutely amazing name.
rirze today at 5:21 PM
Look nice but super expensive for the normal developer. Good luck with the monetization, hope you get some company customers.
deleted today at 6:07 PM
pentacrypt today at 1:10 PM
Looks lovely!
sealedmailuk yesterday at 7:46 AM
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