I released Chainprinter on June 28, 2006. The idea was to recreate the look of text produced by chain printers, the high-speed line printers that were common from the 1950s through the 1970s. These machines often used limited character sets without lowercase, but their output was recognizable from things like subscription labels, driver’s licenses, and identification cards.

For the design, I started with the capital letters from my earlier Linefeed font. I applied textures and filters in Photoshop, exported the results as 1-bit images, and then autotraced them before doing manual cleanup. I also drew a lowercase set, something those printers never had, so the typeface would be more practical for modern use. Most of the reference material came from scans of magazine labels, which gave me a sense of how the characters really looked on paper.

Around 2010 I made a minor adjustment to its metrics, but otherwise it has remained close to its original form. It has not appeared in notable projects, but it sold moderately well, likely because of its connection to a specific moment in computing history.