Font information
| designer | Matthew Butterick |
| year | 2011 |
| publisher | Font Bureau |
| font sample | Download PDF |
| where to buy | Font Bureau |
|
Courier 10 Pitch |
Notes
As I admit in the book, I’m in an awkward position. Officially speaking, I can’t recommend that you use monospaced fonts because they’re ugly and they waste space. But the truth is — I really like them. Why? A good monospaced font is very difficult to pull off. Making every letter the same width is the mother of all design constraints. So when I see a well-made monospaced font, it’s like watching a magician do a really cool card trick.
The golden age of monospaced fonts was probably the 1950s, when IBM led the typewriter industry and released a series of great monospaced designs. As typewriters have faded from the scene, so have monospaced fonts, so there isn’t a lot of incentive to make new ones.
That said, most of the monospaced fonts we have (e.g. Courier New) are just horrible, especially for extended reading. For FB Alix, my primary goal was to make a monospaced font family that was suitable for body text. To do that, the design needed to take monospacing seriously. I didn’t want to adapt an existing font design to monospaced format (surgery that usually goes very badly). So I went back to the source: I got a vintage IBM Selectric typewriter and a bunch of type balls (one of them is pictured above) and I studied samples.
The roman style of FB Alix is based on a type ball called Prestige; the italic is based on a type ball called Light Italic. They weren’t intended to go together, so I had to substantially redraw the italic to match. I made many adjustments to the roman to make it better suited to laser printing. For instance, the punctuation characters on typewriters were made oversize so they would be better able to sustain impacts against the paper. On laser printers, they can be sized normally.
The rest of the family is new. The bold and bold italic styles were drawn from scratch. The fonts have a few special features that are accessible in high-end page-layout programs, like alternate forms of certain characters, and even swash caps.
My official advice won’t change: if you have the choice, you’re always better off with a proportional font. But if you must use or want to use a monospaced font, by all means — use FB Alix.
Wow, I didn’t think it possible for a monospaced font to look genuinely good. That’s quite well done, and I’d take it in a heartbeat over most sans serif documents.
I’m not sure if programmers and server support staff simply prefer or still have to use monospaced fonts, but if so, they could be a big market for this font, simply by how easy it is on the eyes.
FB Alix is now available from the Font Bureau.
Matthew:
I really like Alix but I’m a bit confused about your advice. Assuming no requirement to use a monospaced font, is there any situation in which, as a practicing attorney, you (I mean you, Matthew Butterick) would opt to use Alix instead of a proportional font? I ask because I am tempted to do just this. If a proportional font is preferable in legal writing in all cases, for what use is Alix intended?
My advice is that if court rules give you the choice between a proportional or a monospaced font, you should pick a proportional one. As an attorney, I don’t work in any jurisdiction that requires a monospaced font. Therefore, I would not use Alix in my own court filings (and have not, and do not).
So in the legal world, who is Alix for? First, lawyers who work in jurisdictions that require a monospaced font (like New Jersey). Second, lawyers whose firms use monospaced fonts as a matter of convention or functional need. For instance, I’ve noticed the U.S. Attorney’s office in LA always files its briefs with a monospaced font, even though they’re not required to. (I assume they have a good reason.)
I’m a fan of monospaced fonts generally, and find various ways to use Alix in my non-legal work. (For instance, it’s my usual programming font.)
But one of the pleasures of designing fonts is that you can’t control what happens to your work. Others will use it in ways you didn’t expect. So maybe I should qualify my comments by saying that’s what I think Alix is good for. In the long term, it’s not really up to me.
So, several weeks ago I bought FB Alix just because it is so pretty. I’m not—overall—a huge fan of monospaced fonts, but you’ve done a fantastic job of recreating the Selectric look and feel, and that’s nice.
One excellent byproduct of my purchase is this—I made FB Alix the default monospaced font in my browser (Google Chrome), and suddenly the California Codes page (http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/calaw.html) suddenly became eminently more readable.