I released Cyclopentane on August 17, 2012, inspired by the logo on the backglass of Bally’s 1980 pinball machine Xenon. That game was memorable to me as the first talking pinball table by Bally and the first to feature a female voice, but what stuck with me most was the artwork. The logo used a unicase flare serif style with overlapping strokes that created a continuous, flowing effect. Despite the lack of negative space, the word remained legible, and that unusual quality became the basis for Cyclopentane.

Translating the Xenon logo into a working typeface required compromises. I produced a single unicase style, relying on negative sidebearings and aggressive kerning to manage the overlapping forms. The result works best in logos and display contexts where legibility can afford to be secondary to effect. In many ways it was an experiment in stretching what constitutes a functional font, rather than an attempt to create a broadly usable design.

Cyclopentane was released as a non-free typeface but did not find much of an audience. It received little feedback and went largely unnoticed. In November 2022, I placed it in the public domain, making it available for anyone to experiment with, even if its use is likely to remain limited to highly specific applications.