Tchig Mono

This is Tchig Mono, a monospaced type family that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Why make a monospaced font? For coding, sure, but display? It’s my humble opinion that it’s the aesthetic choices driven by the constraints of the monospaced environment is what makes them attractive. It’s a challenge for the type designer to squash and expand glyphs into a rigid bounding box, and the more unorthodox shapes that spring from this have a feel about them which lends them to postmodernist layouts and hipsterish anti-design. And the payoff for the type designer - no kerning! Yay.

So what’s different about Tchig? Like I said before, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Even the name Tchig is just a stupid, fun sound (although it does show off that nice g!). There are a selection of playful alternates that give text a slightly alien feel. Stylistic set 1 chops off ascenders and descenders of lowercase letters, giving it a kind of small caps meets unicase feel (it is also accessible using the small caps feature). The other sets (or stylistic alternates if you don’t have access to stylistic sets) make certain letters more twirly, more square, more “experimental”. Automatic fractions use a half-width numerator and denominator so fractions like one half and five eighths have the same width as figures (and every other glyph).

There you go then - a monospaced type family not initially intended for use in the usual ways monospaced families are intended to be used. Give it a try. You could even do some coding with it if you like.