I released Senior Service on June 13, 1997. The idea came while I was working on menus for the video game Dark Colony, where I needed futuristic control panels with tiny pixel writing and made-up technical jargon. I built a three-pixel-high lettering system for the game and liked it enough to turn it into a font. To do that, I constructed it as a pixel design, scaled it up in Photoshop, blurred it, and sharpened it again. That process gave Senior Service its rough, cyberpunk appearance. The end result was a techno-industrial headline typeface with bold, futuristic forms. The name came from an Elvis Costello and the Attractions song; it had nothing to do with the design itself, but I had just bought a box set of his work and the title stuck.

Senior Service was initially released with a free commercial use desktop license. On July 20, 2021, I updated it by adjusting vertical metrics, refining outlines and spacing, redesigning accents, expanding language support, and improving OpenType features with the addition of prime marks. In April 2024, I placed it in the public domain.

Although it never gained wide use, it has remained one of my personal favorites. I think of it as a product of its time, tied to the late-1990s fascination with cyberpunk and futuristic design. Even if it isn’t the most readable font I’ve made, it still carries the atmosphere I wanted at the outset.