Notes on pairing a serif with a mono

The pairing I keep coming back to isn't serif-plus-sans, it's serif-plus-mono. A sans body face tries to be neutral and mostly reads as a compromise between the display face and nothing. A mono doesn't compete with the serif at all — it's doing an entirely different job: dates, credits, coordinates, the parts of a page that are true rather than felt.

The trap is using the mono everywhere technical shows up, out of habit, instead of asking whether that particular fact wants to feel precise or wants to feel human. A byline in mono reads like a database record. A byline in the body serif reads like it was written by a person. Most of the time I want the second one.