I released Computechnodigitronic on February 9, 2010. I wanted to create a typeface that captured the feel of 1980s LED and LCD technology without being bound by the actual constraints of segmented displays. The name itself was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the way computer companies in the 1980s would string together prefixes like compu, techno, digi, micro, and tron.
The design started with the idea of segmentation but quickly moved away from the rigid logic of real displays. I drew the notches individually in FontLab, keeping written notes on offsets so the cuts would remain consistent, but the process wasn’t very modular. While the numerals were strictly monospaced to allow vertical alignment in columns, the alphabet was proportional. Still, I narrowed letters like M and W more than I would have in a typical proportional font to reinforce the monospaced look. The result was a typeface that suggests plausibility, even though its construction would never work in actual hardware.
From its first release, Computechnodigitronic was a commercial font. On June 18, 2021, I updated it by removing deprecated characters such as L with dot and E with breve, fixing inconsistencies between the width of the space and non-breaking space characters, and refining LT kerning. I also expanded the OpenType fractions feature to handle long strings like 13/64 or 199/200, and replaced reversed quotation marks with proper forms, keeping the older variants available at Unicode 201B and 201F.
Despite being the font I most enjoy personally, Computechnodigitronic has sold poorly and has not appeared in notable projects. I still used it for a time as the heading on the Typodermic Fonts website, since it best represented the kind of experimental work that keeps me engaged.