14 Best Monospaced Fonts & Typefaces For Designers (2024)
The web is packed full of copy-paste website designs using the same boring old proportional fonts, which makes monospaced fonts the perfect choice for web designers that want to make their site stand out from the crowd.
These old-school, fixed-width fonts are retro, minimalist, and super stylish. In this article, we’re going to telling you all about them and revealing what we think are the 14 best monospaced fonts for designers in 2024.
We’ll also be sharing some examples of websites using monospaced fonts that you can look at for inspiration. Let’s get started.
What is a Monospaced Font?
Monospaced fonts are old-school typefaces that were originally made to comply with the technical requirements of typewriters.
They’re ‘fixed-pitch’ fonts, which means each character within a monospaced font is exactly the same width as every other character. This is the opposite of ‘proportional’ fonts, in which the characters all have variable widths
Here’s an example to illustrate the difference.
As you can see, the monospaced font characters are all contained within the equally-spaced grids, whereas the proportional font characters overlap.
Monospaced fonts were very popular in the early days of computers and typewriters as they fitted in with the mechanical and graphical requirements of the day, but they’ve now fallen out of favor. Today, proportional fonts also make up the vast majority of fonts used across the web as they’re considered more ‘readable’ and beautiful.
Why Use a Monospaced Font?
Monospaced fonts weren’t designed to win beauty cases. Nonetheless, there are several instances where a monospaced font might make good creative sense. Here’s why:
- They have an ‘undesigned’ look. makes them a great choice for designers working on a minimalist website
- They’re retro and full of character. Monospaced fonts remind people of early CRT screens and of days gone by, which gives them a distinctly nostalgic feel.
- You can use them to recreate typewriter text and lines of code. If you’re trying to create a design that looks like it’s been written out on a typewriter, or if you’re working on a coding-related website, monospaced fonts are a perfect choice.
Programmers also tend to use monospaced fonts as their equal-width spacing aids with code legibility.
3 Examples of Sites Using Monospaced Fonts
Before we get into the list, here are some awesome examples of websites already using monospaced fonts that you can look at for inspiration.
1. Nique Radio
This well-branded website for Nique Radio (read: ‘f- the radio’) has used a monospaced typeface family to great effect.
You can see what the designer had in mind here: they wanted to create something impactful and playful for the new-age ‘podcast brat’ website. Radio is an old school platform, so it makes sense they’d use an old-school font to evoke that retro feel with a modern twist.
2. Baugeld Spezialisten
This is the website of Baugeld Spezialisten a European property financing corporation that uses the font Akkurat Mono. The font works well with the business’s minimalist website design. The monospaced font helps to give the site an ultra-modern yet professional look.
3. Pro Battlestation
Pro Battlestation is a blog all about gaming setups. The designer of Pro Battlestations has used the space mono font again here for body text on the home page and in the menu bar, this time alongside a bold logo font to create another brutalist effect.
Best Monospaced Fonts
Envato Elements is a great resource for designers. All of the fonts below are included in their monthly subscription, which starts at $16.50/month. They can be used for both personal and commercial projects.
Alright, let’s jump into the list. Here are what we think are the best monospaced fonts from Envato Elements (our review).
1. Alma Mono
First up, we have the friendly-looking monospace font Alma Mono.
This is a rounded monospaced typeface that is more fun than sophisticated and positively oozing personality. It’s one of the best monospaced fonts available right now and comes in 5 different weights and would work well as a heavy display type.
2. Odudo Mono
Next, we have another rounded monospaced font, Odudo Mono. Odudo Mono is the monospaced version of the uber-popular original Odudo typeface.
It’s another clean but quirky and fun font that’d look great on any website that you want to inject a little personality into. It pops off the page and would work well for both headers and body text if paired with a nice serif font. It’s available in several different weights from bold to light.
3. Walter
Moving into Walter. This monospaced font uses clean, straight lines, sharp edges, and minimalist characters to create a distinctive look. It’s a bold, masculine, modern font typeface that works well for fashion, sci-fi, and cinematic designs.
Walter is best-suited for use in statement designs. It isn’t super readable, but it is very bold. As such, I’d suggest using it for branding, logos, marketing graphics, and other visual displays, but it probably wouldn’t work as well for body text.
It’s available in 5 weights ranging from thin to heavy.
4. Igoe
Igoe is another clean, modern-looking monospaced font that would work well on logos, website headers, and other designs. It’s powerful, exotic, and stylish all at the same time and I think it’d look especially great on an album cover.
It comes in one weight and includes upper case, lowercase, and ‘stylistic alternate’ characters.
5. Vintama
Vintage. Classic. Artistic. Those are the three words I’d use to describe this monospaced serif typeface by Orca Creative. Vintama has a very interesting and bold aesthetic with characters that look almost ‘worn’ thanks to the speckled design. This would look great on something like a vintage clothing website or salon brochure.
It’s available in two versions: a standard version and a ‘shadowed version’. The characters in the latter have a slight shadow to raise them off the page and give them a more artistic feel.
6. Enigma
Next up, we have Enigma Typewriter. This is a super interesting font that was designed to mimic the look and feel of old documents and papers produced by a typewriter. As we mentioned earlier, monospaced fonts are perfect for this as the mechanics of a typewriter required fonts to be monospaced.
True to the name, it’s both mysterious looking and reminiscent of darker days in the early 1940s. The font was inspired by the German Enigma machine, a cipher device used to encrypt messages during World War 2.
If you’re trying to create a design with a mysterious, creepy, old, or WW2-esque aesthetic, Enigma TYpewriter might be the perfect font for that.
7. Bergen Mono
Bergen Mono is part of the Bergen font family. The mono version keeps the personality and general look and feel of Bergen Sans but with the added flair of a monospaced typeface. It’s simple, clean, and highly legible and would look great as the body text on any website. It’d also make a great coding font.
8. System Code
As the name suggests, System Code is a monospaced font inspired by tech. It’s a very decorative typeface with interesting character designs. It’s ideal for posters, logos, and headers, and would work great on a tech- or game-related website.
9. Pine Font
Pine Typeface is another one of the best monospaced fonts. It has a natural, vintage look that’s really easy on the eyes. The semibold characters are smooth, simple, and stylish. It’s a very versatile font that can be used in many different ways, but it works especially well for branding, logos, headers, and posters.
10. Bistro Font
Bistro is a hip, modern font that was inspired by the chilled atmosphere of local cafes and is perfect for anyone working on an online coffee store or cafe website/poster/other marketing materials. It’s quirky, quaint, and full of imperfections that bring it to life.
What makes Bistro extra interesting is the option to enhance it with a bi-color interior slant, fill, or line. The typeface set comes with both the character ‘outlines’ and separate fill options (fill, line, and slant). By superimposing the former over the latter, you can mix and match different color schemes to create all sorts of interesting designs.
The font package includes two styles (sans and serif), three weights, and both the outlines and the three fill options. Plus, it also includes 50 hand-drawn, cafe-themed vector images that you can use alongside the text in your designs.
11. Looper
Looper is another modern decorative monospaced font that has a very futuristic feel. It uses a geometric design with characters based around basic shapes, which gives them a very structured character.
12. Nicolatte
Nicolatte is a gorgeous, versatile monospaced sans font that can be used for everything from logos and branding to posters and website headers. It has a futuristic feel and would work best on futuristic or fashion-related design projects.
13. Laser
Laser is another clean san serif monospaced font that uses straight lines and simplified characters, similar to Walter. It’s modern, elegant, and perfect for posters, banners, and name cards. There’s three versions of Laser you can use: regular, outliner, and ‘stamp’ style. Each has a very distinctive look and feel.
14. Arkibal Mono
Arkibal mono is a classic monospaced font with a more traditional look. The designer took inspiration from old documents and store signs that belonged to his great-grandfather and date back to 1838. He used the same retro-looking characters but added a modern twist – and it looks great.
Arkibal mono comes in 6 weights: thin, light, medium, regular, bold, and heavy.
Final Thoughts
There you have it – 14 of the best-monospaced fonts to use in your designs in 2022. Hopefully, you’ve been able to find the right font for your project here. If you’re still looking for that perfect font, you might find inspiration in one of our other font roundups. Check out our list of the best serif fonts, sans-serif fonts, and modern fonts for more ideas.
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