I introduced Angostura on October 1, 2009, as a complete overhaul of an earlier typeface I’d first released back in December 1997. The original Angostura was basically a sloppy hack of Blue Highway — I was overly ambitious, cranking out multiple styles that were way beyond my skills at the time. Looking back, it was pretty embarrassing.

By 2009 I decided to start over from scratch. The new Angostura took inspiration from American sign lettering of the 1940s and 1950s. It carried over a bit of Blue Highway’s quirky mid-century vibe but leaned harder into a retro sign painter aesthetic. I added low crossbars that echoed industrial deco signage and used monocular “a” and “g” forms in the spirit of the mid-century Futura craze.

I built Angostura into a full family ranging from Ultra-Light to Bold, and I also created spray-paint, wood grain, and stencil variants with custom ligatures for extra authenticity. Textured variants were something I experimented with a lot in the 2000s, and Angostura was part of that phase.

The name came from Angostura bitters, which I was using in cocktails at the time. Despite the redesign, Angostura never really caught on — it was quite unpopular compared to Blue Highway. Still, I think the later version has an unusual quality. It doesn’t fit neatly into a category or carry a strong stylistic flavor, but that gives it a kind of flexibility that could be useful in the right context.

On June 25, 2021, I updated the family by removing deprecated characters, expanding OpenType fractions, and adjusting vertical metrics for better cross-browser compatibility. I also dropped unnecessary fi and fl ligatures and cleaned up some curve errors. In October 2024, version 2.2 reorganized the weight naming system for better menu sorting and web font management.