Remember the good old typewriter.
My Dad used to have a mechanical one. I still have that click-clack of the keys in my ear.
Completely different to the keyboard of a computer

Later on my Dad got an electrical one. Much quicker to type with.
First essay in university has been written with such a typewriter.

Loved it, but hated that I had to rewrite every page where I did a mistake.

Computer was such a big step forward for me.

Anyway, guess everybody knows that typewriters used a special font. This font is our font of the week. It is called:

History

Courier was designed by Howard Kettler of IBM to resemble typewriter fonts.
Later the famous Adrian Frutiger redraw the Courier.

Year of Design

1955

Weights

My courier comes in four weights:
Medium, Oblique, Bold and Bold Oblique.

Description

Courier is a so called monospace font.
The fonts we have been talking about so fare have been so called proportional fonts. That means that each character takes exactly the space it needs. When you have a look at the previous letter parades you will figure out that letters like Mm or Ww are smaller than the other ones.
Why?
I use a square of 150 x 150 pixels for the letter parade. I try to make the letters as big as possible. So I have to reduce the size of Mm and Ww usually.

They need more space than e.g. l or i.

Contrary are the monospace fonts.
They are not-proportinonal fonts. Means: each letter takes exactly the same space.

This was how it worked with typewriters.

Courier is not only a monospace font, it is also a serif font.
Have a look at the l. The serifs are very broad, to fill the space, otherwise people will think that the spaces between the letters are not ok.

Usage

Traditional people like to use it, as reminiscence of the good old typewriter days.
My old Mac had a feature to simulate the sound of the typewriter while typing.

Programmers like the courier. Due to the similar size of each character it is easier to write codes with Courier than with a proportional font.

Tables are sometimes written in Courier, you don’t have to format them accurately, due to the monospace.

Text editors use Courier.
Courier is a web-safe font.
Courier is the font your computer will use, when you get a document and don’t have the font.

See our dummy text with fontsizes from 55 pt down to 6 pt.

Interestingly the U.S. State Department used a 12 point sized Courier New as a standard font until January 2004.

What I like about the font

It is a technical, round shaped font.

Yes and it reminds me of the office of my Dad, of his old typewriter, of the ribbon of the typewriter, even the smell of the office comes back when I look at the font.

Letter gallery

So what will be our next font of the week?
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