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'Operator' is a font designed to make coding easier

The idea is to put an emphasis on how certain characters appear in a programming environment.

Hoefler & Co.

While many of us bristle at the sight of Comic Sans (this writer included), coders have an altogether different view of typefaces and how they're presented. Thus, Operator Mono, the new font from one of the highest-regarded typeface-creators that was forged to make life easier for the folks who build the websites you visit. "In developing Operator, we found ourselves talking about Javascript and CSS," founder Jonathan Hoefler writes. While the blog post about typography and font faces can come off as a bit pretentious, it's clear that the team paid attention to how the likes of brackets, commas and semicolons are spaced and how they appear in back-end coding environments.

The idea is to help a programmer easily identify an extra parentheses or an errant "I" where a "1" belongs amid thousands of lines of code. Operator Mono achieves this with color and italics for the characters that are more important to developers than a typical writer. Oh, and it costs $200 if you like it well enough. Should you want a behind the scenes look at the font creation process, take a gander at the video over at the source.

On our blog, a four-minute film about Operator and the designers behind it. http://hflr.co/3c462

Posted by Hoefler&Co. on Tuesday, February 9, 2016