On Choosing a Font
14-sep-2026 · Goa
(fonts can be a pain. this essay is to help you ease that pain, save time and build towards permanence)
My first startup taught me something about fonts and design chocies in particular.
We were building Zice Travels, and naturally the question came up. What should the logo look like? Once we decided it had to be trademarked, the next question followed close behind. How do we differentiate?
We went through the whole loop. Dozens of fonts, none of them quite right. So we commissioned a font designer to build one from scratch, just for us. We trademarked that too. It felt like the right move. A font nobody else could touch, built for exactly what we were.
The euphoria didn't last.
What followed was years of quiet plumbing (actually not so quiet). Getting that custom font to work everywhere it needed to, across systems, across computers, across the website, was an uphill task nobody warns you about. Every new platform meant licensing it again, embedding it again, testing whether it rendered the way it was supposed to. A font that was meant to express something distinctive had became a pain to maintain.
Looking back, i would definetly avoid the pain.
When I started designing Ravi Wiki, I found myself standing at the same fork. Hey, how should my name look? What should the font be? The old loop, right on cue.
This time I went back to first principles instead. What does a site like this actually need? One of the founding ideas behind Ravi Wiki is timelessness, and once I held the font question up against that, the answer was obvious. I chose monospace.
Monospace holds up for a reason that has nothing to do with taste. It's the typeface of code, of terminals, of things that are meant to run rather than perform. That association is what makes it feel permanent. It isn't trying to look current, because the thing it's borrowed from was never about looking current in the first place. It was about function.
(Trivia, for anyone curious: every character in monospace sits in the same fixed width, the way it did on a typewriter. That's an old constraint from mechanical printing, and it's still why code editors use it. Not the reason I picked it, but a nice coincidence that the typeface built for machines is also the one that ages like one.)
It also happens to be a system font. Already on every device, nothing to license, nothing to embed, nothing to maintain. The typeface and the principle point the same way. Reduce the godamn plumbing..uff what a relief.
Monospace looks decent, timeless and has character.
So ! Font Matters.
Ravi Dabbiroo 2026-09-14, Goa.
PS: The ZICE trademark record that has been filed and is public — Application No. 1761422.