I released Electroharmonix on March 25, 1998. It was a pseudo-Japanese display typeface that borrowed the look of katakana, hiragana, and kanji characters without forming legible Japanese words. For example, the W was shaped to resemble the kanji for “yama,” meaning “mountain.” At the time, I named it after the guitar effects company Electro-Harmonix, mistakenly believing the company was defunct. In retrospect, the name and the design itself were missteps, since it appropriated the visual style of Japanese writing without accuracy.

The font existed as a single style and was initially released free for commercial use. The original version had thin strokes and inconsistencies; in some cases, the uppercase and lowercase slots contained alternate shapes of the same character. In the early 2010s, I redrew it, unifying the design, thickening strokes, and eliminating the alternates to make it easier to use.

Electroharmonix remained obscure until October 2015, when a Japanese Twitter user posted images of English words set in the font and asked if anyone could read them. The tweet went viral, picked up by Yahoo News Japan, and quickly spread into television coverage on Fuji TV and NTV. The attention was intense and unexpected. In 2020, the font even appeared on a Japanese game show, though the segment was cut because contestants couldn’t identify the word “hello.”

The font continued to appear in surprising places. Showa Techno Co., Ltd. used it for an exhibition at Japan Expo in Bangkok in 2024, and in early 2025, Japanese television personality Kazlaser featured it briefly in a show segment about unusual facts. On April 2024, I placed Electroharmonix in the public domain.