I released Goodfish on September 24, 2000. The design was rooted in sign painting methods: I began with a skeleton, applied angled strokes, and finished the characters with triangular Latin serifs. The result was a geometric slab serif with sharp detailing and a slightly improvised quality. The family consisted of four styles—Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic—and was intended for general display use. The name came from a moment in Port Credit when a friend showed me his catch of the day and called it a “real good fish.” The phrase stuck.

From the beginning, Goodfish was offered under a free commercial use license. Over the following years I made small refinements, but the most substantial update came on July 20, 2012, with version 5.001. That release brought cleaned-up vectors, proper overshoots, improved accents, new punctuation, redone spacing and kerning, and the addition of class-based kerning. Vertical metrics were also corrected to align with modern standards. After that upgrade, the design remained stable, and in April 2024 I placed it into the public domain without further changes.

Goodfish has remained moderately popular, likely because of its straightforward, homespun look. I’ve seen it in circulation over the years, but I can’t point to any specific notable uses. For me, it stands as an experiment in bringing sign painter’s methods into a digital format, made more widely available through its long history of free licensing.