Preface
Up to the age of 14, I grew up in Eastern Germany, formerly known as GDR. There lived poor people. So poor, they couldn’t even afford colour (besides red). “Yellow” on a number plate happened to one in a million cars. That was about ten times the total number of cars in the country.
How could I overcome this trauma of my childhood? I had to face it again and in a desperate attempt of self therapy, I began working on CP Mono, inspired by British car plates.
Therapy
The Font was planed mono spaced and caps-only (as the original) with weights from thin to black. As a typographic experiment, every character should fit in the same square, vertically too. Diacritics and ascenders had to come down and later, when i decided to add lower case letters, descenders up. With some difficulties in the bold weights, I managed the basic character set this way. A variant with shortened descenders became a stylistic set and another set straightens angles in letters like A, K or V.
Some of the raw, mechanical charm of the original got lost in the process to keep formal consistency throughout the family and to support legibility. As a solid headline font it does a pretty good job, in short copy text too.
So far, I finished the set of upper and lower case letters, small caps, small figures and alternate forms in five weights.
Cured ?
If you take the pictures on the right: Now, I’m able to look at them for longer then 10 seconds – on a good day, maybe 15 without collapsing. So – yes, it was a success.
Addendum
To answer some questions, coming in, after I added the download link for the beta version:
You can use the font for your projects, no matter if commercial or not. If you want to use it for a logotype, where you have to tweak the outlines to match your idea, I’m also fine with this, and no problem with font replacement techniques in the web (see license link above).
Please mention the author or liquitype in your credits. Samples of your work with CP Mono or links to your project-site are always welcome. I’d like to show it here in a “in use” section.
CP Mono – In Use
Came across this on Typography served and it immediately grabbed my attention, its one of the most stylish mono spaced fonts I think I have seen.
Really well done, can’t wait till its available for download. Any ideas when this may be?
Graham
Thank you Graham. I left the font for a while and have my nose sticking in other stuff right now, so I’m actually a bit “off” the project. However, two or three bugs shouldn’t hurt too much for a free font.
I will try to bring it online during next week.
Cheers, Tino
Hot Dawg! This typeface is amazing!
What a good alternative to other monospace machine faces. Freakin amazing! You are a hero!
Hi Simon. Glad, you like it. Thanks so much + Happy Typing!
This is very stylish. I love the lowercase a’s. But would it be possible to get a version that distinguishes better between capital O’s and zero’s and ones and lowercase l’s? I know that wasn’t the original intent of your design, but it’s worth asking.
Hello Patrick and thanks for your suggestion – good point, actually.
I’m currently working on a website and have a tight schedule. Let’s see what we can do about that in july. I’ll let you know. Best, Tino
Thanks for great font! I’ll use it that in my next design
Hey Alexander, looking forward, what you’re going to do with the font. if possible, throw in a link to some examples.
good luck!
This is a beautifull mono font.
Danke dafür!
Great work mate!
Cheers to Mik and Tranquera.
Special thanks to Graham for the article on his very cool website imjustcreative.
check it out!
Can we use Cufon and potentially @font-face?
I’m not usually a fan of mono spaced but this has something special about it. Thanks for such a great font!
Antonio, yes – you can.
Thank You, Michelle. Big plus for monospaced:
Saves the designer many hours of spacing and kerning
; )
awesome! you’ve just saved my “classic number plate” project. *thumbs up & thanks!
Excellent job!
I am using this font for the monospaced part of a cheatsheet. Too bad I may have to change it because of the 0/O and the 1/I characters looking the same, because I love how readable it is when printed small.
Here’s that document:
http://lateral.netmanagers.com.ar/static/rst-cheatsheet.pdf
Hey Roberto, thank you for the document and sorry for the late reply. It came while I was updating my blog offline.
That’s a nice example. I will try to get my hands on the 0/O and 1/l the next days, but it’s difficult to promise a date.
Cheers, Tino
I’m excited about your reworked mono typeface. You did a fantastic job it looks so clean and evenly kerned, so symetrical. Thank you for sharing this good looking font.
Hi Maura, you’re welcome and thanks for your compliment.
By the way: The font isn’t kerned at all – that’s the rule for a monospaced font. All the different letters (black) have to fill the same space (white). That’s why letters like “i” or “l” have those wide serifs and “m” or “w” look a bit squashed horizontally. However – glad it works …
I love the font and am most definitely adding it to my collection. Thank you! (In case you wonder what I use my monospaced fonts for: I make it a habit to give different consoles or connections, and even different computers different fonts, so that I can easily figure out what window or screen belongs to what working environment. CP Mono is something that has a distinctive personality and thus is perfect for my purposes!)
On a side note… like the person above, I’m not a fan of how hard it is to make sense of the O and 0 characters. Likewise, if you ever get to touch up on the font, I would love it if the parentheses () could differ a bit more from the block characters [], since they look really really alike on my screen, and I tend to use both of those rather much.
Hi Jan, from time to time I’m also working on two computers, two monitors and two keyboards. For the monitors I just set different desktop backgrounds. I often have my fingers on the wrong keyboard, so I have stickers on them too, wich helps, well… a bit.
Added the parantheses to the To-Do-List. (Damn, I have to go in to this… soon… i hope … ;)
Thanks + Cheers