I released Carouselambra on July 15, 2008. I named it after a deep-cut track from Led Zeppelin’s album In Through the Out Door; I didn’t want a reference that felt too obvious. The project grew out of my teenage fascination with the “Houses of the Holy” album lettering, which I had been imitating since the mid-1980s. When I set out to design the font, the only reliable source material was the words “Led Zeppelin,” “The Song Remains the Same,” and “Houses of the Holy.” Other items, such as the Knebworth 1979 poster, seemed to come from a different hand and didn’t fit the Art Nouveau–influenced aesthetic I wanted to capture.

Technically, the typeface is based on Arts and Crafts and Edwardian lettering traditions, particularly the interlocking arrangements. I built the components individually, then combined them into ligatures by hand, extending or modifying elements when necessary—for example, adding length to horizontal strokes on T, L, and Z. Determining how far to push the interlocking effect was difficult, since the original designs were never part of a complete alphabet but hand lettering with limited samples.

Carouselambra was first released as a commercial typeface and later began appearing in official Led Zeppelin merchandise. In June 2021 I issued an update that removed deprecated characters like L with dot and E with breve, fixed inconsistencies between the space and non-breaking space widths, and replaced the reversed left quotation marks (sometimes called painter’s quotes) with proper quotes, while keeping the older forms accessible at Unicode 201B and 201F. Vertical metrics were also adjusted to improve cross-browser compatibility, though these changes did not affect Adobe applications.