I released Great Escape on July 27, 2010, as a commercial family. The design was a return to territory I had explored a decade earlier with Pakenham, but by then I had more refined skills. It was built on geometric principles, though I softened the forms with a subtle bullnosing effect at the corners. That softening was applied optically rather than through measured modules, giving the typeface a rational structure without appearing too rigid.

Great Escape was developed as a large family of twenty-eight styles, covering a range of weights, widths, and italics. I intended it for both display and short text use, where its compact shapes and softened details could convey authority while remaining approachable. The name didn’t carry particular meaning; it reflected a trend at the time of giving fonts multi-word names, like Board of Directors or From the Stars.

I revised the typeface twice after release. On December 7, 2021, I removed deprecated characters, corrected reversed left quotation marks, removed redundant ligatures, lowered inverted punctuation, expanded the fractions feature, optimized kerning for smaller file sizes, and fixed a bug that kept UltraLight Italic from appearing in some application menus. On November 6, 2024, I reorganized the weight naming system in version 1.3: Book was renamed Light, Light became Extra-Light, Extra-Light was changed to Thin, and Ultra-Light was renamed Hairline. No other revisions have been made, and I haven’t seen it used in notable projects.