字Font of the week · · 2 min read
Martian Mono: figures, codes and price lists
A monospaced typeface with width and weight axes from Evil Martians. Good for anything where figures and codes have to line up.
The voucher code on the flyer reads Il0O1l. Most typefaces turn that into a support ticket; Martian Mono turns it into a discount.
Martian Mono comes from Evil Martians, a US consultancy for developer tools, and was drawn by Roman Shamin. It is the monospaced sibling of Martian Grotesk and has been on Google Fonts since November 2022 under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. You can use it freely, commercially too.
What sets it apart
- Two axes in one file: weight from 100 to 800, width from 75 to 112.5 per cent.
- Every character is the same width, the i as wide as the W. Prices and totals line up without a single tab.
- The zero has a slash, the l a foot, the I crossbars. Nobody mixes up codes or passwords.
- Large x-height: lowercase letters reach three quarters of the cap height and stay legible at 12 pixels.
Can you make it wider?
112.5 per cent. The axis stops there.
What it is good for
Anywhere numbers and codes have to be right: price lists, receipts, dashboards, tables, tracking numbers, technical labels. Narrow and bold it makes compact headlines, wide and light it makes calm labels. The limits: no italics. Long body text gets tiring, because narrow letters carry a lot of air around them. The coding ligatures from the GitHub package are missing from the Google Fonts file.
Quote 1,250.00 €
Change req. 3,900.00 €
"Just one tiny thing."
This week's exercise
Set the price column of your website or your invoice template in Martian Mono, width 87.5, weight 500. Then compare how calmly the figures sit.
