I released Graffiti Treat on December 1, 1997, as a single-style display typeface. The design was based on graffiti I noticed under a bridge in Mississauga. The lettering was rough and awkward, but it gave me an idea for a font built from jagged, unconventional shapes that carried some of the same raw character. The name came from Tahitian Treat, a Canada Dry soft drink that was occasionally sold in Canada; I altered it to “Graffiti Treat” as a pun.

From the outset, I licensed the font for free commercial use. On November 14, 2012, I released version 3.001, which added layered foreground and background fonts to make color treatments easier. That was the only technical update, and in August 2020 I placed Graffiti Treat into the public domain without further changes.

The typeface has always been intended only for display use. Its eccentric forms make it poorly suited to text, but they do convey the rough, makeshift character I wanted. Over the years I have seen it used on low-budget video game covers and in clothing store graphics. As of this writing, it ranks around 64th in popularity among my fonts on Dafont, averaging about a dozen downloads a day.