I released Counterscraps on March 3, 2000. It was a dingbat font made entirely of pictorial glyphs, not letters or numbers. The idea came from experimenting with my Palm Pilot 1000, one of the grayscale PDAs of the late 1990s. On my commute I would sketch kitchen-themed clip art on its small LCD screen using a stylus. The drawing apps on the device were extremely limited, but I worked within those constraints. To simulate a fake linocut style, I drew rough shapes with a thick black square nib, then used a thin white nib to carve them back into more refined outlines.

When I synced the device with my computer, I autotraced the drawings and released them as a font. I left most of the outlines as they came from the autotrace, with only minimal cleanup. The result was rough but consistent with the aesthetic I was trying to achieve.

Counterscraps was originally released with a free commercial-use desktop license. In August 2020, I placed it into the public domain. I never updated it beyond the licensing change. Although it was created more as an experiment than as a serious typographic project, I have seen it surface occasionally, even on some dollar store merchandise.