Gothia’s appearance references Gothenburg’s historical connection with the Netherlands—the city was built by the Dutch in the 17th century. This was the era when a number of classic Dutch types saw the light of day, typefaces that are still role models for many contemporary designs. Gothia builds on this rich tradition, infusing the Dutch style with a modern Scandinavian flair.

A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spacings have different widths. Monospaced fonts are customary on typewriters and for typesetting computer code. Monospaced fonts were widely used in early computers and computer terminals, which often had extremely limited graphical capabilities.

Hardware implementation was simplified by using a text mode where the screen layout was addressed as a regular grid of tiles, each of which could be set to display a character by indexing into the hardware's character map. Some systems allowed colored text to be displayed by varying the foreground and background color for each tile. Other effects included reverse video and blinking text. Nevertheless, these early systems were typically limited to a single console font.