I released Superclarendon on October 11, 2007. It began as a commission from a multi-level marketing company promoting a “superfruit” juice. They had a generous budget and didn’t ask for exclusivity, which gave me the chance to produce my own take on Clarendon, the 19th-century slab serif. I wanted to square the forms slightly without making them feel mechanical or techno. The italics were part of the initial release; instead of adding decorative flourishes, I kept them as a straightforward slant to better match Clarendon’s sturdy character. The full family launched at once and was always a commercial release.

Superclarendon’s letterforms emphasized chunky slab serifs and squared terminals, aligning with the late-2000s trend of revisiting Victorian-era typography with a modern edge. It was later licensed in its entirety to Adobe Creative Cloud Fonts, which helped it reach a wide audience. The typeface has appeared in several notable contexts, including IJsbeer in een ijsklontje van glas by Sem Deeleman, The North Face’s “50 Years of Parkas” campaign, Simple & Clever Cooking by Stevan Paul, the 2017 Manje Bistre movie poster, Bobkat’65’s This Lonely Road album art, and one of the posters for La La Land.

On June 25, 2021, I updated the family by removing obsolete characters and ligatures, repairing a missing lowercase ñ in one font, fixing a misplaced character, and adding a missing bar symbol to the italic. In November 2024, I modernized the style naming system, corrected the italic lowercase ą for Polish, expanded the character set to include recent currency symbols and the German capital Eszett, and refined Vietnamese accents. These updates ensured wider language support and improved compatibility.