I released Oil Crisis on August 27, 2000. The typeface originated from a collection of Consumer Reports magazines from the 1970s and early 1980s that I found while helping my aunt clean out her mother’s basement. Each issue contained diagrams of cars such as the Dodge Omni and Chevrolet LUV. I scanned these illustrations and attempted autotracing, but the print quality and the detail of the drawings produced poor results. I ended up redrawing most of the cars manually.
The final result was a dingbat typeface of 1970s-era cars and trucks. I originally distributed Oil Crisis with a free commercial-use desktop license. In August 2020, I placed it in the public domain.