I released Cretino on January 26, 2000. It began as a joke while I was experimenting with a new Wacom Graphire drawing tablet. I sketched clumsy calligraphy in my font editor, then exaggerated it by adding short, misplaced strokes and scribbles over the capitals as a kind of parody of fanciness. The name was chosen to suggest its silliness, though I later realized it was an unfortunate choice.

The typeface included both uppercase and lowercase letters, along with a reasonable set of punctuation and accents for a script font. Its look was deliberately unrefined, as if someone had picked up a calligraphy pen for the first time. I first put it on my Larabie Fonts site as something of an easter egg, never expecting it to be taken seriously. To my surprise, it caught on. I’ve seen it used on winery labels, restaurant menus, clothing shops, and even as a tattoo.

In the 2010s, I gave Cretino a single cleanup. I scaled the vertical metrics, fixed the left sidebearings of the capitals, and corrected graphical glitches, but I left the awkward, playful quality intact. It was originally released with a free commercial-use desktop license, and in November 2022 I placed it into the public domain.