I released Augustine on August 23, 2007. The name wasn’t chosen for any typographic reason; I often named fonts after whatever song I had playing at the time, and in this case it was “St Augustine” by Band of Horses. My intent was to simulate hand-cut Tuscan lettering, but the way I went about it was unusual. I drew the basic shapes with a mouse as clean polygons, then distorted and processed them in Photoshop to create a degraded, stamp-like texture. After autotracing and cleanup, I overlaid the distressed forms onto the original outlines to give the impression of an irregular, mushy print.

To push the effect further, I applied distortion and dilation filters and simulated ink being pulled away at the center of strokes, like the capillary action of real stamps. I added OpenType ligatures so common letter pairs would automatically vary, avoiding mechanical repetition. The result had an eerie, worn quality that I hadn’t planned; I only realized later that the effect carried a slightly unsettling tone.

Augustine didn’t find notable use in design or media, but it remains an experiment in translating crisp digital geometry into something that looks organic and imprecise. On June 25, 2021, I issued an update that removed deprecated characters, corrected the relationship between the space and non-breaking space widths, replaced reversed quotation marks, and adjusted vertical metrics for better browser compatibility. There have been no further updates since.