It was 1993. I had just discovered a piece of software called “Fontographer” on a computer at my on campus job. I spent a lot of late nights in Kinko’s making copies and thought the degraded text on the store receipts looked interesting. So, I did what any bored 18 year old student would do: I drew what I thought a full alphabet of those letters would look like in Fontographer. It was named Devolution (de-evolution; it was the 90s). I thought making fonts was fun so I started making them whenever I had time. A few months later, I saw a mailer from House Industries and mailed them a letter to see if they wanted to sell any of my fonts. They liked the first one and hated the rest. It was renamed Housecopy and showed up in a catalog in 1995. In the words of Rich Roat, “Subsequent sales were slow.” The font is terrible, but I wouldn’t be where I am if I hadn’t made it.
