I released Tandelle on April 7, 2005. It grew out of methods I had developed while making fonts for video games. My aim was to create a sans serif that worked well in narrow horizontal spaces. To do this, I used flat points on verticals and sharp points on horizontals, which created a distinctive rhythm while keeping the counters open. Web fonts weren’t yet widespread, so I imagined it being used mainly for headlines and subheads in print. In spirit, it was related to Steelfish but approached with a different balance.

The family launched with four styles—Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold-Italic—and was always commercial. Tandelle was not conceived for any one project, but it did find use locally at The Trunk Line hair salon in Nagoya, which adopted it in its branding.

On May 25, 2021, I updated Tandelle. I added a slash to the eth (ð), removed deprecated characters like L with dot and E with breve, and replaced reversed quotation marks with proper forms. I narrowed the ellipsis, replaced outdated florin and currency symbols with correct glyphs, and moved alternate forms of “r” and “y” into the Unicode Private Use Area while making them accessible via OpenType Stylistic Alternates and Stylistic Set #1. The update also fixed inconsistent spacing between space and non-breaking space, adjusted bold fi and fl ligatures by moving them to discretionary ligatures, and refined outlines to smooth irregular curves. Foot and inch marks were added at that time as well.