I released Containment on August 23, 2007. The goal was to build a layered system of fonts that could be combined to create textured headlines. It came as four coordinated styles: a plain layer, a shadow layer, a layer of small dots, and a composite of all three. The idea was similar in spirit to Budmo, my marquee lightbulb font, but instead of lights I used grit-like textures to form the effect.

Containment was an all-caps design taken from Tandelle Italic. The dotted textures were built in Photoshop using a Gaussian distribution of fuzzy dots, which allowed them to taper near the edges of each letterform rather than appear like a flat wallpaper pattern. I blurred the shapes, added the dots on a dodge layer, merged, increased contrast, and ended up with clean 1-bit black dots on white. Those were autotraced, then layered as masks over the letterforms. The crunchy texture came from adding random segment breaks with a filter and converting curves into straight lines, which not only created the crystalline look but also helped reduce file size and improve performance.

I never updated Containment after its release, and I haven’t seen it used in projects. Looking back, I think it could have been named more closely to Tandelle, the earlier project it evolved from, which might have made its relationship clearer.