I released Electric on May 28, 2016. The design came from a very narrow source: the nameplates on 1960s Gibson guitars, stamped with “CUSTOM MADE” and flanked by decorative stars. Dealers used these plates to cover the bolt holes left when swapping out stoptail bridges for Bigsby vibratos. The original plates were engraved with a manual pantograph, and the zig-zag patterns of the letters reflected the limits of that machine.

When I built Electric, I had only those plates as reference. I could see the treatment of C, U, S, T, O, M, A, D, and E, but the rest of the alphabet had to be extrapolated. The challenge wasn’t the outlines themselves—they were simple enough—but recreating the zig-zag fills in a way that followed the same mechanical logic. It had to look like something an engraving stylus could have physically traced. The result was an all-caps display font, including the special starburst characters used on the plates.

Electric was never free to use, and I’ve never issued an update since the initial release. It has not appeared in any notable projects, but it stands as a study in translating the look of a mechanical engraving process into digital type.