Credit

I released Credit on August 19, 2000, as a merger of two closely related projects: Credit River, which I had released on June 25, 1996, and Credit Valley, which I created in 2000. Credit River was a modular serif design with the kind of deconstructive quirks that were common in the 1990s, such as a backward A and an unconventional lowercase g. Credit Valley kept those quirks but softened some of the more exaggerated traits, giving it a slightly more usable feel. I named both after the Credit River and Credit Valley in Mississauga, where I was living at the time, though the typefaces had no conceptual link to the location.

Credit River existed only as a Regular style. Credit Valley expanded the idea into a more conventional family with Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic. In 2012, I gave the family a significant cleanup with new spacing, kerning, accents, and punctuation. In 2014, I refined Credit Valley again, but Credit River was left untouched.

The typeface was always free. In April 2024, I placed it into the public domain along with many of my older designs. I haven’t seen Credit used in projects, and I regard it as more of a transitional experiment between River and Valley than a fully realized family.