I released Clipwave on November 3, 2011, during a time when I was coming off months of repetitive corporate work that had drained much of my energy for type design. I wanted to create something very different from the polished, restrained fonts I had been producing on contract. Clipwave was the result, a geometric experiment that leaned into unpredictability and produced a restless, almost agitated texture.

The letterforms were drawn as uppercase-only shapes with a laser-trace appearance. I added internal patterns that reminded me of the tracking lines left by robotic floor cleaners. To avoid repetitive results, I built an OpenType system of alternates that automatically shuffle between variants, creating a pseudorandomized effect across words and phrases. This gave Clipwave a jittery, technological feel that stood apart from anything else I was working on at the time.

Clipwave sold very little, but it was a project I pursued more for personal release than for commercial expectations. On June 18, 2021, I updated it by removing deprecated characters such as L with dot and E with breve, expanding the OpenType fractions feature to support long numerators and denominators, and dropping the fi and fl ligatures, which had been superfluous. I also refined some outlines where curve errors might have caused graphic problems in certain applications.

I haven’t seen Clipwave in notable projects, but for me it represented a deliberate break from routine, an attempt to capture unease and restlessness in letterform design.