If you are a developer or designer, you spend a good portion of your day writing, reading, and generally looking at code. Unless you are psychotic, you do so in a monospaced typeface which aids in legibility of code by giving each character the same width as every other character.
While this is a horrible idea for prose, the poetry of code is well served by this as it allows us to more easily recognize patterns and to scan through scores or hundreds of lines of code to easily find a specific snippet.
Unfortunately, nearly every freely available monospaced typeface1 is hideous.
Menlo
Courier New
Monaco
Certainly there have been experiments to compare mono space types to minimize this, and yes there are some new players in the field, but the fact remains that there may not be any pleasant, free monospaced type.
But that’s okay, right? Is it too much to ask to spend a few bucks on something that will improve your day-to-day life, bringing you happiness where once there was only meh?
Enter Pitch
Comparison of Pitch (black) and Courier (grey)
I heard about Pitch through a now-deleted tweet by @kneath about a year ago. I was immediately intrigued by the prospect of having such a vision of beauty staring back at me all day.
Can we take a minute to talk about how sexy these fractions in Pitch (klim.co.nz/blog/pitch-des…) are?
Kyle Neath (@kneath) August 21, 2012
I spent a couple days thinking about it, and ended up picking up Pitch a week or two later. I went with the $75 option for Roman + Italic Regular weight, but you can get a single weight for $50 as well. Despite the package name, the font supports bold weight as well.
@klimtypefoundry Been using Pitch 14pt for a couple of weeks now. Beautiful. evernote.com/shard/s9/sh/86…
—Caleb Hearth (@caleb_hearth) October 25, 2012
Take a look for yourself.
Pitch is a love letter to the typewriter.
I used to spend all day in front of my computer, looking at what used to be an ugly terminal. Spending a little time picking out a more attractive typeface now pay back every day with a little smile when I see a character I really appreciate. Purchasing a well-designed typeface has been one of the best investments I’ve made. Join me.
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1
Font is what you use, typeface is what you see. Since we’re referring to the design of the characters, we’ll use the term typeface instead of font. Font is a better term for the file used to deliver the typeface. Think of fonts as MP3s while typefaces are songs.