A spiky start to 2021

 For about ten years, from the early 1990s until 2002, I sold typefaces mostly on CDs. I designed typefaces for three CDs sold by the short-lived company Wayzata Technologies. After it folded, I published my own CD that include what had been on those three CDs plus a bit more. When the technology to cheaply burn CDs from a personal computer arrived, I added a CD of novelty fonts. This method of selling gave me an incentive to produce lots of typefaces and that incentive attracted me to a couple of font distortion programs that were published in the 1990s. I used one to produce about a dozen fonts with spikes or spines on the letters that were included on my novelty-font CD. 

In 2002 I learned of a better way of selling typefaces, through an on-line font vendor. I happily abandoned CDs, upgraded my typefaces where needed, and submitted most of them to myfonts.com and fonts.com. To start off 2021 I have resurrected seven spiked typefaces that I did not move to myfonts.com, renamed them, expanded them to include more accented characters, corrected problems I found, and generated the font files with FontLab 7 so they include some common OpenType features. I added four spiked fonts that I had moved to myfonts, renaming and expanding them as well. The resulting eleven typefaces make up the Kaktis collection on fontspring.com. Like all novelty fonts, they have limited uses but there can be situations in which one is just what is needed. 

It is remarkable how much digital type has changed since I started playing with it in the late 1980s. When I started the only PostScript I could make was Type 3, which did not have some features that Adobe kept for itself. In addition to the PostScript file, one needed a bitmap file so the type would be visible on the screen. Apple developed TrueType to do an end-run around Adobe, but Microsoft was the primary promoter of this new format. Then the OpenType format was introduced and almost entirely replaced old PostScript format. I suspect all the formats available now will be obsolete in 20 years.