I released Earwig Factory on July 14, 1998. It began as an attempt to recreate Univers from memory. The result was simply a poor imitation—too close to Univers, but not as good, and therefore pointless. Rather than discard the effort, I took it in a different direction by cutting up the outlines into jumbled shapes and turning it into a ransom-note style font. The name came from a more personal source: my parents’ home exterior was heavily infested with earwigs at the time, and the word stuck in my mind.
The first release was a basic ransom-note design without variants, offered free for commercial use. Much later, on May 10, 2012, I expanded the family with two layered styles called “letters” and “cards.” These allowed designers to overlay color or texture across separate layers. At the same time, I added an OpenType shuffling feature. I set it up using three character classes so that adjacent letters would be substituted with different versions, creating a pseudorandom appearance. This feature made the text look less repetitive and more convincingly chaotic.
Earwig Factory has not had notable uses, but it was an experiment in salvaging a failed idea and seeing where it could go. It remains a deliberately uneven display typeface that reflects both a technical exercise and a personal memory.