RETRO CHECKBOOK JNL

By the 1990s, the availability of font creation software opened the door to an explosion of creativity, experimentation and exploration into the world of digital typography by amateur and professional alike.  The undisputed king of the freeware fonts was Ray Larabie through his Larabie Fonts website.  It seemed at the time that Ray’s output was endless, and he amassed dozens upon dozens of fonts that ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime.

In fact, Ray was the driving force of encouragement and a behind-the-scenes “mentor” who helped Jeff Levine Fonts get underway in January of 2006.
As Larabie’s focus changed to higher-quality commercial type design with the launch of Typodermic, Inc., many of his “less than perfect” font experiments were withdrawn and shelved.

Ray eventually turned those lost (and sometimes questionable) typefaces into a bundled zip archive released into the public domain through Creative Commons.
One particular design “Boron” (circa 1996) featured computer-oriented lettering as if etched onto a circuit board.

Running with this idea, and with Ray’s approval, the electronic elements were stripped away, the characters cleaned up and modified, and the font reworked into Retro Checkbook JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.