I released Chinese Rocks on August 28, 1999. The design was based on the hand-cut rubber-stamp lettering I had seen on Chinese export crates from the twentieth century. To capture that look, I scanned lettering from a cardboard box, then recreated the chunky polygonal texture by hand in Fontographer for the glyphs I had to extrapolate. The result was a rough, stamped effect that carried the irregular charm of the originals.

At first, I only offered the Regular style, and I made it free for commercial use. It caught on quickly, which encouraged me to expand it into a family. Over time I added styles such as Fat, Condensed, and Shaded. These were mechanically derived from the Regular, but the process distorted the texture, so I had to manually shift the points of the texture to restore the proper look. Those additional styles were released as commercial fonts; the Regular remained the only free version.

On June 25, 2021, I updated the family. Deprecated characters like L with dot and E with breve were removed. I expanded the OpenType fractions feature to support longer strings such as 13/64 or 199/200. Vertical metrics were adjusted for better cross-browser compatibility, outlines were refined to fix curve errors, and the update ensured consistent behavior across modern applications.

Chinese Rocks has been used in some high-profile contexts. A textured variant was incorporated into the Red Dead Redemption video game series, where it helped establish a rugged historical feel, though I wasn’t directly involved in the adaptation. The Toronto Raptors also adopted it for branding, using the font in its original form.