I began developing PostScript typefaces in 1988, releasing my first typefaces as shareware for the Macintosh. My first publisher was Educorp in about 1990. It was a strange relationship that ended after a year or two, but it gave me the motivation to continue developing typefaces. I would rather not claim credit for most of those early typefaces which Educorp sold, some of which were awful, but I have abandoned many of them.

The cover was rather undistinguished, isn't it?

Font Pro 2 was followed by the 125 typefaces of Font Pro 3, and the 150 typefaces of Font Pro 5. I cannot say that the cover for Font Pro 3 was much better than that of Font Pro 2, but many of my best typefaces were designed for this CD.

Font Pro 5 contained mostly novelty fonts and other strange creations. I do not think it was the best of my three Wayzata designs, but the cover was by far the best. I earned almost nothing from this CD because in early 1996, just a few months after the CD was released, Wayzata went out of business--they found their promotion budget was almost as big as their revenues, a very bad situation. Within a few months I found another publisher and worked much of the summer editing old typefaces and creating additional faces in order to reach that magic marketing number of 500. However, as August began, this new publisher underwent a management shake-up and decided that my CD would compete with their existing shareware/freeware product. They dropped it (and a bunch of other CDs they had people developing) just as I was finishing it.

After some inconclusive talks with other potential publishers, I did what I really did not wanted to do: I published a CD under my own label. I had self-published before, and had learned that I did not have the marketing skills needed to launch a successful product. The name I gave the product is my admission of that lack of marketing savvy: No-Hype Type CD. As you can see, I copied the design of Font Pro 5 for the cover.

The No-Hype Type CD gathered all the typefaces from Font Pro 2, 3 and 5, added a few more, and put them together as one CD. I knew I would have trouble marketing it because I am not a good marketer, and I was right. I had 1000 manufactured and sold 100-200 via some mail lists. My sales then stagnated, and I sold 500 to a large distributer for less than my average cost because I saw no prospect of ever selling them all. Sales revived in 1998 when the on-line auctions took off. On-line auctions became my major method of distribution.

After I ran out of copies of the No-Hype-Type CD, I sold faces on CD-R until I was introduced to myfonts.com. Once I realized the advantages they offered, I quickly exited the CD business. I do not currently sell any of the CDs and have no intention of ever selling them again.

Along the way, my typeface library was localized for Polish distribution. It was sold only in Poland, but it is also no longer in distribution.