I released Chrysotile on January 15, 2008. The name was chosen to suggest tiles, though the “Chrys” part was arbitrary. The design began with Ligurino Condensed, which I reshaped into a compact sans serif more suited to an industrial theme. From there I built the effect of characters stamped onto weathered metal plates.

To create the texture, I used Photoshop with photographs of old zinc-coated steel as reference. The processed layers were applied to the outlines to give the impression of chamfered, corroded surfaces. I added ligatures for common letter pairs so repeated characters wouldn’t look identical, allowing text to feel more natural and irregular, closer to what you’d expect from real-world industrial stenciling or stamping.

Chrysotile was a commercial release from the beginning. On June 25, 2021, I updated it by removing deprecated characters such as L with dot and E with breve, refining vertical metrics for better cross-browser compatibility, and ensuring stable behavior across applications. I haven’t seen it used in notable projects, but the typeface has remained in my catalog as a representation of that rough, utilitarian aesthetic.