Giulia Boggio’s Ufficio Mono is a monospaced typeface with soft edges

When Giulia Boggio set out to create Ufficio Sans, the monospaced extension was already part of the plan. “Let’s start by mentioning that Ufficio means Office in Italian, my native tongue, and this has informed a lot of the design decisions for it,” says Boggio, Creative Director at ALT.tf and one half of Dogma Studio. “The Ufficio ‘suite’ was in some way always meant to include a monospaced cut. This was mainly as the core idea for Ufficio itself is the one of a durable, usable workhorse typeface that could be used across the deck.” The London-based designer’s approach to Ufficio Mono centres on restraint. Rather than simply spacing out the existing proportional design, Boggio treated the monospaced version as its own entity whilst maintaining a clear family resemblance. Certain glyphs, like the lowercase ‘a,’ remain unchanged to preserve that connection. Others required more substantial rethinking to work within fixed-width constraints. The usual suspects presented the expected challenges. Letters like ‘W,’ ‘M’ and their lowercase counterparts demanded careful attention, but Ufficio Mono’s development involved more than just condensing wide characters. Some glyphs from the original family were already quite tight – ‘j’ and ‘t,’ for instance – which meant Boggio was simultaneously tightening some letters whilst widening others. "You could almost say that the Mono cut has a softer, friendlier feel at times even if it is in a way also cinched in,” Boggio notes. That softness comes through in deliberate choices. Take the terminals on ‘f,’ ‘j’ and ‘t’ – by avoiding angular solutions, Boggio gave the typeface room to breathe beyond purely technical applications. The proportional cut of Ufficio Sans expresses its softness through a slight wideness; the monospaced version finds it through what Boggio describes as its “soft reach.” It’s this quality that prevents Ufficio Mono from feeling overly tech-focused or sharp-edged.