I released Canada 150 on June 30, 2017, as a typeface to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation. The project began in late 2014 with Mesmerize, a free eighty-style typeface I had designed. In 2015, I was contacted by Grant Johnson of the Canada 150 Federal Secretariat about adapting some of Mesmerize’s styles for the sesquicentennial logo. I offered to create a customized font family at no charge and decided to expand language coverage beyond English and French to include indigenous languages. That decision wasn’t requested but came from my own conviction that a national anniversary font should represent all of Canada’s peoples. Researching British Columbia’s languages proved difficult, since orthographies were not consistently documented, but I did my best to include unusual characters and accents wherever I could.
Canada 150 was initially available only through an application process on the Secretariat’s website. After the official celebrations ended, I released it publicly under the name Canada 1500. Around that time, I was approached by Constance Adams about adapting the design for a manned Mars mission. For this version, I added scientific and space-related glyphs. Beyond the standardized astrological and astronomy symbols already in Unicode, I created many others for moons, asteroids, and celestial bodies, assigning them to the Private Use Area for spacecraft labeling and Mars base signage.
The release of Canada 150 and 1500 drew controversy in the design community. Some professionals objected that the government had relied on a free font rather than commissioning a paid design. The debate became part of a larger conversation about how free resources affect the creative industries. Despite this, I was invited to Ottawa to sit in the VIP section on Parliament Hill for the July 1 celebrations. Ironically, the font itself was not used as widely as expected; many designers opted for similar-looking alternatives instead.
On July 26, 2025, I released a new version of Canada 1500 with expanded coverage. This included characters added in Unicode 16.0, such as Latin Capital Letter Lambda (U+A7DA), Latin Small Letter Lambda (U+A7DB), and Latin Capital Letter Lambda with Stroke. I also added UCAS characters used in Carrier (Dakelh), Chipewyan (Dënesųłinë́), and Nattilik. Over time, Canada 1500 has appeared on free font sites like Dafont and 1001fonts.com, reaching a wider audience.
I have seen little in the way of notable use, but there was one special project called Omushkego, a custom version made to help children learn Cree. For that version, I added OpenType coding so that learners could produce characters using custom keyboard combinations on a Mac. Canada 1500 remains in the public domain, freely available to anyone who wants to use it.