I released Clockpunk on February 18, 2012. The project began as a commission from BioWare, who were developing a typeface for the Dragon Age series that could support a steampunk mood while remaining readable in long passages of dialog. I looked to early twentieth-century railroad signage for inspiration, particularly the octagonal lettering often used on boxy signs. Franklin Gothic served as my base model for proportions and stroke contrast; I reworked it into sharper, more angular forms, giving it a spikier, industrial character.

Clockpunk was built as an industrial grotesque with Regular and Small Caps styles. For the Small Caps, I scaled down uppercase forms and manually thickened them so they didn’t feel too light next to the full caps. This was essential for game text, where the typeface might be used for both dialog and headings. The goal was to make it versatile, able to work at smaller sizes without losing its distinctive structure.

On May 25, 2021, I updated it by removing deprecated characters such as L with dot and E with breve, expanding the OpenType fractions feature to handle long strings like 13/64 or 199/200, and narrowing the ellipsis, which had been excessively wide. These refinements improved its functionality without changing its overall appearance.

BioWare did in fact use Clockpunk in the Dragon Age games. I played the first one myself and found it worked well in context as a text font. Outside of that, I haven’t seen it appear in other notable projects.