Diurnal Mono, a calligraphic font for coding and tables

Monospaced fonts are designed to work in a technological context – coding, accounting, alignment of tables – and so it is unsurprising that such fonts mimic the appearance of technology and use reduced geometric shapes, following the early OCR fonts that were designed to be read by machines.

As the technology has become more sophisticated, so have the monospaced fonts evolved to include more humanistic traces. Diurnal Mono is one such typeface – superbly legible and with unapologetically calligraphic forms.

The designer Nikola Djurek has succeeded in negotiating the constraints of the fixed-width space of the evert glyph, without compromising the results. Instead he opted for some novel solutions, adding serifs to fill the very open shapes, or simplifying the shapes of the complex letters such as ‘W’. The cursive italic reinforces the humanistic writing model even further, and the fluid forms of the italic work surprisingly well in a longer text too.

Diurnal Mono extends the superfamily of sans styles: Diurnal Text and Diurnal Display; and the serif styles: Nocturno Text, Nocturno Display, and Nocturno Stencil.