I released Markerfield on April 12, 2010. My aim was to simulate the texture of whiteboard markers—the squeaky, uneven strokes that stand out on a smooth surface. My first attempts at drawing directly on slick material didn’t work; the strokes were too inconsistent. Instead, I drew the letters on bond paper with a marker, then scanned them. From there I built a streak layer in Photoshop, which I blended with grit and film grain textures to capture the feel of a marker’s surface residue. The end result was cleaned and assembled into a digital typeface.

The textures were designed to hold up when scaled down to smaller display sizes, but at very large sizes the autotraced vector shapes become more obvious and less convincing. Markerfield was always meant for display use, particularly in contexts where the goal is to emphasize a point or call attention to an idea. I never saw it adopted in notable projects, but I still consider it a fairly faithful digital approximation of whiteboard handwriting.

On June 25, 2021, I updated Markerfield to keep it technically current. That update involved removing deprecated characters, refining metrics, and expanding OpenType fraction support. The typeface remains a paid release.