I wanted to make something I didn’t know how to make. That’s how it started. The font was supposed to be raster. Pixel-based. It came out as dots. I called it Kropki, because what else was I going to say. I was seventeen. Poland, 1997. Communism had fallen about ten years earlier but nobody knew what to do about it yet. I sat at a Macintosh making fonts instead of doing homework. School was boring. The computer wasn’t.
In some issue of MacFormat I saw an ad for Linotype. That they existed. That’s it. I didn’t know they accepted fonts from outside designers. I had no plan. I sent a letter and a floppy disk on a whim. I wanted a catalog — a thick book of font specimens. Only someone in the industry or someone lucky had one of those. No catalog came. A contract did.
My sister grabbed a German-Polish dictionary and translated word by word. We more or less understood. The company that printed Helvetica wanted my font. One of the better moments. And moments were scarce back then.