Scott V. Kissinger

I'm the founder of Serial Comma LLC, a lawyer by trade, and a techie at heart.

Choosing A Monospace Typeface

25 Apr 2020 » design, jekyll
screen capture of JetBrains Mono typeface

JetBrains Mono

Having chosen a primary typeface and a complementary typeface for this project, it occurs to me that I will also need a monospace typeface for displaying blocks and snippets of code.

I can’t pretend I selected the monospace typeface with anything approaching the rigor of the other two. I saw a reference to JetBrains Mono, spent five minutes on the website, and made the decision.

JetBrains does a better job than I could of explaining why their typeface is well-suited to coding. Their website is a concise masterclass in demonstrating the considerations in designing a typeface for a specific purpose. I urge you to spend a few minutes studying their site.

Figure 1 is a comparison of JetBrains Mono and the sans serif typeface for this project, Sarabun.

sample text in jetbrains mono and sarabun
Figure 1. JetBrains Mono (top) and Sarabun

And here is a code block:

hr {
  margin-top: 20px;
  margin-bottom: 20px;
  border: 0;
  border-top: 1px solid #F7F1F1;
  border-bottom: 1px solid #fff;
}

Very nice.

The only downside is the font is not available on Google Fonts so I had to figure out how to upload it a different way.