Owned

I released Owned on July 29, 2005. My aim was to capture the look of urban marker writing without relying on photographs of graffiti. I carried a sketchbook and studied the way people scrawled letters on walls and surfaces, then practiced with markers to imitate the flow. What struck me most was the backslant, leaning to the left, and how the strokes often carried one letter into the next. I included ligatures from the start to emphasize those natural irregularities and connections.

Owned was always distributed as a paid typeface, intended for general display use. On June 25, 2021, I updated it by removing outdated characters such as L with dot, E with breve, and others. I also replaced painter’s quotes with proper quotation marks, adjusted the vertical metrics (reducing the size of characters by about ten percent), and corrected curve errors that had crept into the outlines.

I haven’t seen Owned appear in professional or notable projects, but it remains part of my catalog as an attempt to translate the feel of graffiti marker writing into a functional font.