I released Flyswim on May 1, 2007. At the time, there was a trend for lettering that looked rough, casual, and hand-drawn, as if it had been scribbled quickly. To create the effect, I printed out my Gnuolane typeface and traced over it in pencil, adding drop shadows to give the letters more dimension. I kept the tracing deliberately loose, then used an eraser to scuff the lines so they wouldn’t appear too clean. After scanning the drawings, I added a simulated film grain effect to roughen the texture further. The result was a single-style font that looked plausibly handmade.

Flyswim also included custom ligatures to substitute certain letter pairs automatically. That feature helped break up repetition and made the lettering look less mechanical. The name came from a short-lived Urban Dictionary entry dated April 18, 2007, which defined “flyswim” as moving the body in various directions in suspended gravity during heavy precipitation. I chose it because it was unusual and because I knew it wasn’t likely to stick around in common use.

Initially, Flyswim didn’t see much adoption. Once it became part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud font collection, it started appearing more often in everyday design work, though not in any notable projects. On June 25, 2021, I updated the font to remove deprecated characters, improve vertical metrics for cross-browser use, and refine some outlines. The font has always been licensed in full; no free version was offered.