I designed Spectrashell in 2007 as part of a side project to launch a passport case. I drew the letters manually in FontLab and built them around angular, hexagonal principles, which were meant to connect visually with the shell-like pattern of the case itself. The result was a single compressed style that carried the hexagonal theme through its letterforms.

I released Spectrashell for free, hoping it might help promote the passport case. The typeface never saw any use beyond that original context, but it documents a moment when I was experimenting with tying product design and type design together.

On June 25, 2021, I updated Spectrashell by fixing vertical metrics, correcting quotation marks, removing obsolete characters, and cleaning up spacing. In April 2024, I placed it in the public domain.