Complementing NORM’s signature typeface LL Riforma, designed between 2012 and 2018, LL Riforma Mono is the latest addendum to the studio’s genre-defining type œuvre. The release coincides with the practice’s 25th anniversary since setting up in Zürich in 1999.

LL Riforma Mono reminds us of NORM’s earliest days when several self-made monospaced fonts were tailored to fit their ultra-normative approach to graphic design, meticulously considered and rigorously tuned to the millimeter. Still today, the monospace genre occupies a special position in the NORMverse. They consider the unified character width the most simple and versatile solution for typesetting. And they cheerfully embrace the challenge to fill the boxes in the best way possible with the rather random shapes that history has brought upon us in the form of Latin letters.

LL Riforma was predestined for a Mono fit, given its geometric construction and its slightly boxy shapes owed to a relatively large x-height. Many letters offered themselves to convenient squeezing into the boxes, while others provided sufficient options to expand on the playful undertones of this highly regulated typeface. The confidently prolonged serifs and crossbars present variations on some of the distinct strokes of LL Riforma, while the pronounced sharpness of the original shapes gives way to a slightly softer overall appearance. All the while the Mono styles preserve with grandezza the two outstanding qualities of their predecessor: a graphic appearance in large applications as well as excellent readability in smaller sizes.

To underscore the monospace dogma, LL Riforma is equipped with the full sets of Unicode-approved box-drawing characters and block elements. Both sets originated in the era of early digital fonts, when various kinds of lines and square-shapes were displayed and printed with the help of these semigraphics due to lack of better options. The approach became redundant once PostScript technology enabled the integration of text and drawings (as well as any other kind of imagery), and in the dawning age of artificial intelligence, the long-discarded semigraphics might remind us that typography was once a craft of the human hand.