Ceroxa

I released Ceroxa on October 26, 2006. The name is synthetic, chosen simply because it sounded sinister and fit the mood I was trying to capture. I wanted a stencil typeface that looked like it had been sprayed on a wall, combining the technical precision of DIN-like forms with the roughness of urban lettering. The basic structure came from Milibus, a font I had created earlier that year, which I simplified and altered to remove spurs and lean toward a more minimal, engineered style. I added cross-shaped stencil struts that implied crosshairs, giving the design a faint connection to futuristic weaponry.

To create the spray-painted texture, I built elaborate grunge layers in Photoshop, adding simulated film grain through a plug-in called Exposure. The results were converted into 1-bit rasters, autotraced, and then painstakingly cleaned up by hand; the detail was often excessive and required hours of refinement to make the outlines manageable. To avoid obvious repetition in text, I programmed OpenType ligatures based on common digraphs and trigraphs, drawing on lists originally compiled for cryptographic purposes.

Ceroxa was released as a commercial font from the start. On May 25, 2021, I updated it by removing deprecated characters such as L with dot and E with breve, fixing minor outline problems, and adjusting vertical metrics for better cross-browser compatibility. Looking back, Ceroxa was an exercise in merging influences from military and industrial stencils with the messy irregularity of spray paint, pushed into a speculative, dystopian direction.