I released Bench Grinder on February 9, 2010, after exploring a curious corner of typographic history. In the 19th century, printers sometimes ground the serifs off metal headline type with saws or files, producing crude sans serifs before such designs had been formalized. That rough practice gave me the idea for a digital typeface with a similarly raw, industrial look. I wanted the design to feel unrefined yet functional, echoing the awkward energy of those hacked metal sorts rather than smoothing them into something polished.
A few years later I created Bench Grinder Titling, which was simply the same font restricted to uppercase; the intention was to give designers an option tailored for display uses. The name turned out to be a mixed blessing—after release I began receiving spam about bench grinder wholesale prices, which wasn’t the kind of attention I had in mind.
In July 2021 I updated Bench Grinder to improve its technical reliability. Vertical metrics were adjusted for better cross-browser compatibility, though these changes were invisible in Adobe applications. I flipped the reversed left quotation marks, moving the originals to their proper Unicode points, removed obsolete characters such as L with dot and E with breve, and revised the ellipsis width. I also extended the OpenType fractions feature so it could handle long strings like 199/200. At the same time, I made small refinements to align verticals, normalize overshoots, and improve autohinting.
I had bold web headlines in mind when designing Bench Grinder, especially settings that paired strong letterforms with intense color. The typeface has not seen notable use, but for me it remains an experiment in revisiting a forgotten typographic practice and translating it into a digital form.