When Bloomberg Businessweek was starting work on their election issue in 2012, Richard Turley commissioned a monospaced version of their sans, with the aim of using it to make data look purely like data, untouched by human hands. Commercial Type had moved into an office in Chinatown in New York earlier that year; Christian Schwartz had noticed monospaced serif type on many signs in the neighborhood, set in Latin alphabets that look as though they have been included almost as an afterthought in Chinese typefaces. Inspired by these awkwardly beguiling un-designed forms, he offered to draw a monospaced version of Publico Text as well, enabling data to look like data in Businessweek's serif face as well. Though it was not space-efficient enough for this special issue, it appeared in info graphics and in feature headlines in quote a few subsequent issues.
The forms of Publico Text Mono feel at once familiar and alien—recognizable as Publico, but with a distinctly strange texture. Greg Gadzowicz added the italics in 2014. In keeping with the un-designed aesthetic, the italics are optically corrected obliques.
Narrow characters like I i j and l reduce the overall density of words, and make Publico Text Mono Roman feel lighter than its proportionally spaced equivalent at larger sizes. To help alleviate this for display usage, we have added a Roman No. 2, a stronger weight that better approximates the general color of the Roman weight in the other Publico families. The whole family is available for desktop, web, and mobile app licensing.
