Category Archives: Fonts That Almost Made It

View the web font specimen sheet.

A font that almost made it. A serif font designed by Jean François Porchez of Porchez Typo­fonderie, Le Monde Cour­rier attempts to “re-establish a style halfway between writ­ing and printing.”

First, let me say, I love this font! The over­all struc­ture and sys­tem (when viewed on Safari, Chrome, Opera or Fire­fox from my mac) is gor­geous. I want to use it. But I can’t (at least not for extended text).

Unfor­tu­nately, Le Monde Cour­rier has slightly uneven spac­ing at text sizes. For exam­ple, look at the word read­ing (first word, fifth line down) in the top exam­ple at left. The space between the e and a is too loose com­pared to the re and di in the same word. This prob­lem occurs mul­ti­ple times in text, between a vari­ety of let­ter pairs.

And, unfor­tu­nately, the prob­lem gets worse on Win­dows plat­forms (see the lower exam­ple at left, a screen­shot from Safari on Win­dows 7). Let­ters get nar­rower, block­ier, and more loosely spaced. Let­terspac­ing between ed, er, ea, en, and al all get too loose. Granted, the font remains leg­i­ble, but it loses some of its read­abil­ity and grace.

I cat­e­go­rize Le Monde Cour­rier as an “Other Serif” font, because it does not fall neatly into any of the gen­eral his­toric cat­e­gories com­monly used to describe serif type.

Le Monde Cour­rier grace­fully mixes-and-matches approaches to font design. The e, i, and l have italic influ­ence, while most other let­ters are Roman. It has a large x-height, a sin­gle decker g, and an almost mono­line stroke — all of which make the font feel more struc­tured. But it also has gen­er­ous aper­tures, pen-formed ser­ifs, and an implied stress on the bowls — all which help it feel more humanist.

Le Monde Cour­rier is an absolutely lovely font orig­i­nally designed for print. It has a cou­ple of spac­ing and hint­ing issues to work out so it can con­tinue to be absolutely lovely on screen. It’s worth keep­ing an eye on. If we’re lucky, future ver­sions of the font will have bet­ter spac­ing. The web ver­sion of Le Monde Cour­rier has 6 weights and styles and is avail­able from Type­kit.