Free Font Friday: Telegrama

Telegrama is monospaced typeface that was designed by Yamaoka Yasuhiro. If you’re looking at this typeface and thinking, “this looks like something straight from a ’90s computer,” that’s because it is.

Telegrama was designed in 1992. What is now known as Telegrama was originally two separate fonts, named Telegrama Raw and Telegrama Render. After creating the two versions of Telegrama, the typeface’s creator, Yamaoka, actually forgot about the fonts for a full 16 years. Upon rediscovering them in 2008, he made some minor adjustments and released them as a pair. In this sense, telegrama really is like a time capsule.

Telegrama sports the typical monospaced aesthetic though it has some quirks that make it unique. The pixel-based way the structure breaks down in particular gives viewers a sense of the tools that were likely used to create it. The selectively-rounded edges of some of the pixels and their resulting soft glow feel as though you’re looking at a CRT monitor, though if you rub your eyes, the glow remains.

Due to its 2 versions, Telegrama is a fairly versatile typeface, though in general, monospaced fonts are not the easiest to read, so avoid using these in body text. You can find Telegrama here.