I introduced Scritzy X on February 15, 1996. It was one of my earliest attempts at making a font and may have been the first. I used the grid feature in my font software and applied a slant to the outlines, which gave it an angular, broken look. My aim was to create something unusual, almost like mechanical parts that had been taken out of a device—functional but unattractive. The original release didn’t include the “X” in the name and was slanted.

In the 2010s I revisited it. I created an upright version without the slant, thickened some of the spindly strokes, and added accents and more characters. That revision made it more complete, but not necessarily more appealing; Scritzy was always intended to be awkward and ugly. One of the first things I did with it was to extrude it into 3D at work, apply chrome effects, and print it. The result looked more striking as a rendered object than as flat text.

Scritzy X was initially released under a free commercial use desktop license and was later placed in the public domain. I think of it now as a starting point in my journey as a type designer—raw, unrefined, and unconventional, but a record of my willingness to experiment and push against expectations of what a font should be.