Monospace typeface

from VTF
designed by Ariel MartĂ­n PĂ©rez

1 Style

Regular

Best for

  • Headings (display text)
  • Long reading text (body text)
  • User Interfaces (functional text)

License

Free

Specialty

A free, playful monospace typeface with large ink traps, and optional cursive shapes, that resets the sober expectations for that genre.

My thoughts on Sligoil Micro

Let’s dig into the world of monospace, again! Sligoil Micro is a very striking and interesting free font, designed by Ariel Martín Pérez for the interface of the Unknown Number game. Within that, “Sligoil” is the name of an evil fictional company. The typeface is rather contrasting, and exaggerates some features, which gives it a lot of personality. You can clearly see that compared to other monospace typefaces.

Roboto Mono: What your monospace text might look like. Not so interesting, just what you might expect. Simple text, but monospaced. Sligoil micro: What your monospace text could look like. More contrasting and opinionated, almost dancing. Do you dare breaking out?
Roboto Mono is functional, but booooring. Do you dare to break out of that, with Sligoil Micro?

For a little body text or some UI-components, the large ink traps spice everything up. When looked at in detail, you can better see how funky, wobbly, and crazy some letter shapes are. Not taking things too seriously and making the monotenous spacing of monospace more fun.

Weird pretzel a, Punched p, Melted g, Dented e
Extra large ink traps and some crazy letter shapes make it so compelling

Sligoil Micro is a typeface that works well in – surprise, surprise – small sizes, like 12 or even 10 px font size. Also, nicely on a dark background. You might consider it for coding, or maybe for the code snippets in your blog?

Sligoil Micro performs well at small sizes. You could easily use it for code snippets in your blog. I show you this on dark background. Anything else would be ridiculous. Because I’m a coder, I’m a hacker, I’m a checker … yeah.  pre, code {   font-family: "Sligoil Micro", "Papyrus", monospace;   font-size: 1rem;   line-height: 1.4; }   Or make your code a bit crazy by using cursive alternates:  pre, code {   font-family: "Sligoil Micro", "Papyrus", monospace;   font-size: 1rem;   line-height: 1.4; }
A cool typeface for coding, maybe even with the cursive shapes?

A nice feature are the stylistic alternates, where you can activate cursive shapes that turn certain characters into upright italics. This is rather unusual, and unexpected in monospace typefaces.

Looking at cursive shapes of a, g, l ,r, s and @
Optional cursive shapes that can be activated via stylistic alternates. The “g” melts even more here. I love that!

As with any monospace font, use it wisely and adjust spaces for larger text. If you want to learn more about that, check out this review.


What do you think, of this week’s font recommendation? Tell me in the comments below, also if you have a suggestion for another typeface.

Typographic power to your inbox

  • Font Friday: I recommend one typeface per week, free fonts included.
  • Type Tuesdays: articles & videos that up your design game.
  • Join 2700+ typography enthusiasts, unsubscribe anytime.

4 Comments

  1. A ton of personality, playfulness, monospace – a style I adore, finally properly named font and FREE?
    This is a lottery Oliver!

    Project? This might be a UX superstar for my upcoming website redesign.

    🤩

  2. Cool font! 🤩 To help people looking for how to enable cursive alternatives in VS Code:

    “editor.fontLigatures”: “‘ss01′”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *