Echelon

I released Echelon on January 9, 2000, after experimenting with drawing vectors on a Palm Pilot PDA. The vector grid on the device was coarse, which meant both node placement and Bezier handles were limited to fixed positions. This forced me to strategize how to shape the curves, but it also made consistency easier; the restricted handle angles allowed me to reproduce the same curve reliably across glyphs. I completed much of the work during a flight from Toronto to Seattle, then synced the drawings back to my computer to finish spacing, kerning, and assembly.

The original release included four styles: Regular, Italic, Condensed Regular, and Condensed Italic. Around 2003, I discontinued the condensed versions, leaving only the first two. Echelon was conceived as a display typeface with compact proportions, subtle curves, and light flourishes. The name came from an intelligence program I had learned about through a friend in the telephony business; at the time it felt like a mysterious, insider reference, though it later became mundane.

Echelon was initially released with a free commercial-use license. It won a “font of the year 2000” contest, and the prize was a copy of FontLab, which I continued using for many years. One unusual use I heard about was an engraving project for a millennium clock—supposedly an atomic clock designed to run for a thousand years—though I never saw it myself. In April 2024, I placed Echelon into the public domain.