1403 Vintage Mono was inspired by the IBM 1403 mainframe line printer from the 1960s. Jeff Kellem began his research for the project but printed samples were minimal, requiring a bit of guesswork for some shapes. He started with the basic 48 glyphs (26 letters, 10 digits, and 12 symbols) used on the 1403 ‘A’ chain. Mixing between the ‘A’ and ‘H’ chains, a few more characters were discovered (e.g.- a square lozenge symbol) and added to the font. Kellem also sourced several more glyphs from chains that had been modified to support Icelandic text.
In the early stages of design, the weight was heavier, slightly wider overall, and spacing was tighter. With rigorous proofing and testing of each iteration, Kellem made critical adjustments. What would become “1403 Vintage Mono Limited” now had the original 52 characters present in the printer, along with the basic complement of Latin characters and small capitals in place of lowercase characters. The completed font supports Unicode Latin-1 and Adobe Latin 2 sets.
The “Pro” version of 1403 Vintage Mono has a much larger repertoire of glyphs — clocking in at 366 Latin alphabet based languages supported, including: Vietnamese, Catalan, Czech, and Polish. In addition, the Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew scripts are present, increasing support by 77 more languages.
Use 1403 Vintage Mono at display sizes on book and album covers, in film titles, and elsewhere to signal trust and accuracy.
At text sizes, its monospaced quality means it is easy to set copy in columns and grids. It also lends a sense of authenticity and officialdom to indices, labels, and documents. •!•