“I may steal that…you may see that again.”—Matthew Carter, in reference to a glyph design in 1403 Vintage Mono Pro.
Overview
1403 Vintage Mono Pro was inspired by the IBM 1403 mainframe line printer. The idea to create it was sparked by Mark VandeWettering wondering aloud if a font existed reminiscent of that printer. This all uppercase, monospace typeface was quickly expanded from the initial 52 characters making up the A and H print chains to over 1,500 glyphs, supporting most languages that use the Latin alphabet (including Vietnamese), Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew. Small capital forms were added to act as lowercase. Continued research, design, and development led to a new release in early 2016 with over 2,300 glyphs, along with refinements throughout.
Check out the 1403 Vintage Mono Pro interactive specimen site designed with Kenneth Ormandy:
History
During the creation of 1403 Vintage Mono Pro, a few blog posts were written about the history and progress of designing the typeface. At TypeCon 2013, Jeff Kellem gave a well-received presentation on Resurrecting Type of the IBM 1403 and heard nice compliments about the 1403 typeface during the conference and the TypeCrit critique session. He was also invited to talk about it at Hackers Conference 29, November 2013.
The 1401 Demo Lab Exhibit
On Wednesday, 20 November 2013, the Computer History Museum (@ComputerHistory) in Mountain View, California, USA opened The 1401 Demo Lab exhibit with two working, restored IBM 1401 mainframes, 1403 printers, card punches & sorters, tape libraries, and related equipment (see the restoration team's progress status updates and a nice post on the restoration by project lead Robert Garner). Weekly demonstrations happen on Wednesdays at 3pm PT and Saturdays at 11am PT. Another great exhibit to visit at the museum! See the printer that inspired this typeface!
OpenType Features
In addition to small caps, the following OpenType features are included: contextual fractions, including pre-built fractions, and support for arbitrary fractions up to 10 numerators and denominators; superscripts, subscripts, and scientific inferiors; ordinals; dotted zeros for slashed zero; historical variants; and locale variants for Bulgarian, Moldovian, Romanian, Polish, Catalan, Navajo.
Character Sets & Glyphs
1403 Vintage Mono Pro supports most of the Adobe Latin 4 character set (including Vietnamese), Cyrillic (including Bulgarian variants), Greek (Monotonic), and Hebrew. A partial sample of the glyphs included is below:
Languages
Over 160 languages are supported, including:
| Afar | Inari Sami | Portuguese |
| Afrikaans | Indonesian | Rhaeto-Romance (Romansch) |
| Albanian | Interlingua | Romanian |
| Aragonese | Interlingue | Rundi |
| Asturian / Bable / Leonese / Asturleonese | Inupiaq (Inupiak, Eskimo) | Russian |
| Avaric | Irish | Samoan |
| Aymara | Italian | Sango |
| Azerbaijani in Azerbaijan | Javanese | Sardinian |
| Bashkir | Kanuri | Scots Gaelic |
| Basque | Kara-Kalpak (Karakalpak) | Secwepemctsin |
| Bislama | Kashubian | Selkup (Ostyak-Samoyed) |
| Bosnian | Kazakh | Serbian |
| Breton | Kikuyu | Serbo-Croatian |
| Bulgarian | Kinyarwanda | Shona |
| Buriat (Buryat) | Kirgiz | Slovak |
| Byelorussian | Komi (Komi-Permyak / Komi-Siryan) | Slovenian |
| Catalan | Kuanyama / Kwanyama | Somali |
| Chamorro | Kumyk | Sorbian languages (lower and upper) |
| Chechen | Kurdish in Armenia | Sotho, Southern |
| Chichewa | Kurdish in Turkey | South Sami |
| Chuvash | Kwambi | Spanish |
| Cornish | Latin | Sundanese |
| Corsican | Latvian | Swahili |
| Crimean Tatar / Crimean Turkish | Lezghian (Lezgian) | Swati |
| Croatian | Limburgan / Limburger / Limburgish | Swedish |
| Czech | Lithuanian | Tagalog |
| Danish | Low Saxon | Tahitian |
| Dutch | Lule Sami | Tajik |
| Edo or Bini | Luxembourgish (Letzeburgesch) | Tatar |
| English | Macedonian | Tonga |
| Esperanto | Malagasy | Tsonga |
| Estonian | Malay | Tswana |
| Faroese | Maltese | Turkish |
| Fijian | Manx Gaelic | Turkmen |
| Filipino | Maori | Tuvinian |
| Finnish | Mari (Lower Cheremis / Upper Cheremis) | Ukrainian |
| French | Marshallese | Upper Sorbian |
| Frisian | Moldavian | Uzbek |
| Friulian | Mongolian in Mongolia | Venda |
| Galician | Nauru | Vietnamese |
| Ganda | Navajo / Navaho | Volapuk |
| German | Ndebele, South | Votic |
| Greek | Ndonga | Walloon |
| Greenlandic | North Sami | Welsh |
| Guarani | Northern Sotho | Wolof |
| Haitian / Haitian Creole | Norwegian (Bokmal) | Xhosa |
| Hawaiian | Norwegian Bokmal | Yakut |
| Hebrew | Norwegian Nynorsk | Yapese |
| Herero | Occitan | Yiddish |
| Hiri Motu | Oromo or Galla | Yoruba |
| Hungarian | Ossetic | Zhuang / Chuang |
| Icelandic | Papiamento in Aruba | Zulu |
| Ido | Papiamento in Netherlands Antilles | |
| Igbo | Polish |
Latin script sample:
Type Specimen
Specimen shown in the TypeCon 2013 TypeGallery in Portland, Oregon, USA:
1403 Vintage Mono Pro specimen (PDF) (updated with the February 2016 release).
Check out the 1403.slantedhall.com interactive specimen site designed with Kenneth Ormandy:
Font in Use
- Trevor Brymer’s 6EQUJ5 Film
- Book cover of Talk Nerdy to Me: Grantland’s Guide to the Advanced Analytics Revolution
Let us know if you use our typefaces in your projects.
Trevor Brymer’s 6EQUJ5 Film
A custom subset was designed to recreate the 1977 SETI Wow! signal printout from an IBM 1403 mainframe line printer (all CGI) in Trevor Brymer’s short film 6EQUJ5 [IMDb], released in 2016. “A tale of love, loss, and signals from outer space.” Here’s a sample image from the film, courtesy of Trevor Brymer.
Along with a closeup before full integration into the shot:
The custom font was also used for title cards throughout the film. Samples are shown in this clip:
And, on the film’s poster:
Client: Trevor Brymer, “6EQUJ5” film
Designer: Jeff Kellem, Slanted Hall
Book Cover: Talk Nerdy to Me: Grantland's Guide to the Advanced Analytics Revolution
Jason Oberg (@ExtraBlase) used the 1403 Vintage Mono typeface in the book cover design for Talk Nerdy to Me: Grantland's Guide to the Advanced Analytics Revolution (2014). The book's in the 2014 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (@SloanSportsConf) attendee gift bag. You can buy the sports analytics compilation from Grantland (@Grantland33). Read our blog post about it.
Photo credit: Jason Oberg
Client/Book Cover Designer: Jason Oberg
Book: Talk Nerdy to Me: Grantland’s Guide to the Advanced Analytics Revolution
Typeface Designer: Jeff Kellem, Slanted Hall
On Fonts In Use
Let us know if you use our typefaces in your projects.