I released Induction on May 28, 1996 as a free display typeface. The design was influenced by the cover lettering of New Order’s 1988 compilation Substance. At the time, I hadn’t seen Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet, but I later realized that Induction shared some of its ideas—letters reduced to horizontal and vertical strokes, stripped of curves and diagonals, and carrying the feeling of technology dictating form. Where New Alphabet was deliberately radical and often illegible, I softened the approach slightly so that Induction remained usable while still carrying that stark, mechanical quality.

On July 20, 2021, I released a significant update. I adjusted vertical metrics to improve cross-browser compatibility, slightly reducing character size in the process. Alternate letters were shifted to OpenType Stylistic Alternates and Stylistic Sets #1 and #2. I replaced all spacing and kerning, redesigned several characters, and expanded the fractions feature to support very long numerators and denominators. I added reversed left quotation marks to Unicode 201B and 201F, prime marks to 2032 and 2033, and many additional monetary symbols. Language coverage was expanded, diacritical marks were redesigned, combining accents were introduced, and the period and comma were raised to the baseline except when paired with “!” and “?”.

In November 2022, I released Induction into the public domain as part of a larger batch of older free fonts. It has not seen notable use, but for me it remains a record of how I tried to balance historical influences with my own interpretation of technological constraint.