I released Rainforest on October 7, 2009, in response to a commission from Apple. They had requested a typeface for video editing software that would evoke the look of the Jurassic Park logo without directly copying it. Although I don’t believe Apple ever ended up using it, the project pushed me to work in a direction I might not have otherwise explored.

Rainforest took cues from early twentieth-century typefaces such as Rudolf Koch’s Neuland and Monotype’s Othello. Like the Jurassic Park logo, the letters are more condensed, with proportions that emphasize vertical mass. While the stroke logic doesn’t exactly mirror Othello, there is a resemblance in the way forms are cut and shaped. The design resulted in a small caps display typeface with a bold, organic structure.

From its first release, Rainforest included plain, outlined, and thin-line layer variations. These styles allowed designers to build stacked effects or use them independently. On June 25, 2021, I updated the family to remove deprecated characters, adjust the width of the ellipsis, redesign the Vietnamese dong symbol, improve OpenType fractions, and refine the outlines to correct curve errors that caused issues in some applications.