I released Adriator on August 4, 1999. The design began with a single letter “T” from the logo of an Irish room heater brand. A, Irish person had sent it to me, and since their name was Adrian, I created the name Adriator as a portmanteau. With only one letter to work from, I extrapolated an entire alphabet in that style.

The result was a striped display typeface with bold thick-and-thin contrasts. Looking back, it reminds me of decorative details from The Price is Right set design or old drive-in theatre snack bars. At the time, I thought it had a trendy Y2K character — a groovy, experimental reimagining of 1970s styles that a lot of designers were playing with in the late 1990s. Many of us were doing reinterpretations rather than straight revivals, which became more popular later in the 2000s.

I’ve spotted Adriator in use here and there, though never in any especially prominent context. Compared to some of my other projects, it was technically simple to produce, though having only a single letter as a starting point was a challenge. With logos like AC/DC or KISS, I at least had three unique letters to extrapolate from, but in this case I had to invent the rest almost entirely from scratch.

Adriator was first released with a free commercial-use desktop license. In November 2022, I placed it in the public domain so it could be used or adapted freely.