I released Contour Generator on December 7, 1998. The design was inspired by the stark geometry of the 1968 RCA logo. I didn’t attempt a strict recreation but used its three letters as a starting point for an entire alphabet. The name came from the kind of labeling you might see on an analog synthesizer, which felt in tune with the retro-futuristic look of the typeface.

The font never had a lowercase set; it was built entirely in capitals. I drew it from scratch in Fontographer, extrapolating the RCA shapes into a full character set. Early on I included a feature that allowed the A, V, and W to flip their wedge shapes so they could lock together more tightly. In the original version this had to be done manually, but in 2012 I issued a major update that added OpenType code to automate the alternates, activated through the standard ligatures feature. That same update also introduced kerning classes, completely redid the spacing, refined many of the letterforms, overhauled accents, and replaced the minimal punctuation with a more complete set, extending language support significantly.

On July 20, 2021, I updated Contour Generator again. This revision replaced the reversed quotation marks with proper forms while retaining the old ones at Unicode 201B and 201F, tightened the gap between double quotes, corrected the width of the ellipsis, added prime symbols, and removed deprecated characters. It was initially released with a free commercial-use desktop license, and in November 2022 I placed it fully into the public domain.

I haven’t seen Contour Generator appear in notable projects, but for me it remains an example of how a small seed of inspiration—in this case, three letters from a logo—can be extrapolated into a full, working display typeface.