Power-up Your Code Environment with Twilio Sans Mono

Power-up Your Code Environment with Twilio Sans Mono

Today, we are thrilled to announce that we are releasing Twilio Sans Mono under an open source license for developers of all stripes to download and use.

Twilio Sans Mono is the latest addition to our type superfamily that also includes Twilio Sans Text for body copy and Twilio Sans Display for headlines. It is welcoming and incredibly adaptable. It can be big and bold or quiet and utilitarian. We are excited to roll it out across the entire Twilio brand. If you attended SIGNAL or have visited Twilio.org recently, you have already seen it in action.

A practical, fun, and beautiful coding font

From the outset, we wanted to create a mono font that was not only practical, but genuinely fun to use and available to all.

We know there are already many great mono fonts on the internet. So, we started by asking our developer community what criteria they use to select their preferred code editor font. Our brand design team partnered closely with internal developers and the award-winning Sharp Type digital type foundry to make Twilio Sans Mono a reality. The result is a beautifully crafted set of characters that we hope you will love.

Modern features to power-up your code environment

With Twilio Sans Mono, you have access to an extensive set of coding ligatures, including some TwiML specific characters! The widths of the characters are all optimized for comfortable and space efficient viewing in a code editor. Punctuation marks, likewise, are scaled up specifically for viewing code. In a common text font, punctuation plays a supporting role within a body of text, whereas in a code environment punctuation has outsized significance and must stand out to improve the ability to quickly scan code.

Twilio Sans Mono supports Extended Latin, and comes in eight weights, each with roman and true italics: light, light italic, regular, regular italic, medium, medium italic, retina, retina italic, semibold, semibold italic, bold, bold italic, extrabold, extrabold italic, heavy, and heavy italic. Retina weight is a version of regular that is optimized for Apple Retina® screens.

We built these fonts as a gift to anyone who develops because it was developers who championed Twilio from the start. We hope this font brings some joy to your coding environment while you are building the next big thing.

Over the coming months, you'll see Twilio Sans Mono appear in more parts of Twilio's ecosystem. But you can take it for a spin right now. If you do give it a try, please make sure to tell us what you think and share a screenshot of Twilio Sans Mono in action over at @TwilioDevs on Twitter!

Twilio Sans Mono is licensed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL) so that everyone can download and use the best coding font in the world (at least in our opinion!).

We can’t wait to see what you build with Twilio Sans Mono!

Gratitude

We’d like to extend a huge thank you to our partner who designed our new typeface, Chantra and Lucas Sharp at Sharp Type LLC. We loved working with you on this project, and are so happy with the final design.

Thank you also to our contributors at Twilio who provided invaluable feedback and put the typeface to the test in a multitude of environments. Thank you to:

• Dominik Kundel
• Jamie Wilson
• Katie Porter
• Sean McBride
• Serena Buxton
• Kelly Kuhl
• Jennie Janzen
• Riley West
• Nathan Sharp

Thank you to our legal team who made open sourcing Twilio Sans Mono  a reality:

• Marisa Chen
• Rinat Shangeeta
• Eugene Kim

Nathan Sharp is an award-winning, multidisciplinary creative. Among other things, he is a cat dad, an amateur motorcycle mechanic, an explorer of sounds, a reader of fictions, a collector of cameras, a fixer of discarded things, and the Principal Visual Designer on the Core Creative Team at Twilio. He wants to thank you for reading this story. He can be reached at nsharp [at] twilio.com.