(Also see the original size on Flickr.)

For a fairly long time I thought my career was going to be in graphic design. On the left hand side is a typeface design I never quite completed, back in the mid-to-late nineties.

It was an attempt to render a scalable font out of Espy Sans (right hand side), a bitmap font that Apple has used in various products over the years.

Epoch Bold has a lot of flaws, but there are some characters in the font that I still rather like. It was a good try at capturing a very “open” looking font, with a tremendous x-height, in a humanist sans.

I found the sampler printout of Epoch Bold while going through some old things and scanned it in, since I am not sure I have it in machine readable form any more. I think I have backups somewhere on Iomega Zip drives. :( The screenshots of Espy Sans were taken from an Apple Newton emulator; I couldn’t find any version of Espy that would work on any machine I own.