I introduced Carbon on April 13, 1999. The name came from one of its variants, Carbon Phyber, which used a carbon fiber–inspired texture. At the time I was surprised that no other typeface carried the Carbon name, although since then many others have been released under it.

The design started with a simple idea: reuse a capsule shape—an elongated pill form—as the foundation for as many characters as possible. A flat-sided “O” naturally fits that description, and I tried to echo that same geometry throughout the alphabet. The result was a unicase geometric design with a brutalist, systematic character.

In 2012 I expanded Carbon into a full family. The process began with a major cleanup of the heaviest weight to make the letterforms consistent. I then created the thinnest style and used FontLab’s blend tool to interpolate intermediate weights, working step by step rather than through a continuous axis. I tracked stem widths on paper to make sure the transitions were controlled. That expansion brought Carbon to seven weights with italics, for a total of 42 styles. Alongside the solid forms I added Carbon Phyber with its hexagonal mesh texture and Carbon Fence with a diagonal grid effect. The textured versions had to be recreated whenever I revised the family, since they couldn’t be edited without starting over.

In October 2024 I reorganized the weight naming system, shifting Book to Light, Light to Extra-Light, Extra-Light to Thin, and Ultra-Light to Hairline. That update also added a section sign and corrected minor errors in the textured variants. Over the years I’ve seen Carbon show up in high-tech and automotive contexts, which makes sense given its engineered, modular appearance, though no single use stands out. I released it initially under a free commercial use license, and it remains part of my catalog today.