I released Sofachrome on June 13, 2001. The design came from my memory of lettering on Pontiac cars in the early 1990s. I tried to extrapolate the heaviest possible weight from whatever reference material I had seen, though I didn’t photograph it at the time. The result was a wide, industrial sans serif with a distinctly automotive feel. From the start, the family included regular and italic styles as a single package.

The typeface caught on quickly in the automotive sector. Toyota and Mazda both licensed it, and it became a common choice for logos and product labels. Alongside Ethnocentric, Sofachrome has remained one of my more visible designs in branding contexts.

In the 2010s, I expanded Sofachrome into a larger family, drawing the new weights from scratch rather than interpolating. On November 22, 2024, I updated the family to improve browser compatibility, clean up curves, and standardize name tables. The name Sofachrome was a reference to Paul Simon’s song “Kodachrome.” It has always been a paid typeface.