I released Darkheart on January 30, 2007, with the intention of capturing the atmosphere of 1960s horror cinema typography. The design draws on the interlocking letter trend that appeared in that era and later faded by the mid-1970s. Traditional typesetting made that approach difficult, requiring hand lettering or phototypesetting, but with OpenType I could automate substitutions to create the same effect.

The base of the typeface is my Gnuolane design, a compact grotesque with some 1960s character. I squared some of the counters to echo the look of fonts like Ad Lib, then created a wide range of interlocking variations. The font relies on straightforward ligature substitution, but there are many combinations, which made programming a large set of rules necessary. To push the retro feel further, I randomized points using a software routine, converted the results into a bitmap, and autotraced it. As a finishing touch, I skewed the design slightly to the right to give it more of a cut-paper feel.

I updated it on June 25, 2021, to remove deprecated characters and fix some inconsistencies. It was always intended as a general-purpose spooky display font, and I’ve seen it used on Halloween-themed products over the years.