Saved by Zero

I released Saved by Zero on May 17, 1998. The design was based on the headlines I remembered from Omni magazine, which had a distinctive science fiction look in the 1980s and 1990s. The letterforms were drawn with worm-like curves to echo that retro sci-fi style. I wasn’t trying to recreate the exact custom lettering from Omni, but I wanted to capture the sense of futuristic technology that the magazine conveyed.

The name came from “Saved by Zero,” a song by The Fixx about Zen meditation. It seemed to suit the typeface’s otherworldly character. Saved by Zero was initially released with a free commercial use desktop license, and on April 2024, I placed it in the public domain.

I updated it on July 20, 2021, correcting reversed quotation marks and expanding the OpenType fractions feature to handle longer numerators and denominators. Beyond that, I haven’t revised it further.