Some Ingrimayne-Type History

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 that Educorp sold, some of which were awful, but I have abandoned many of them.

In 1993 Wayzata Technology published the first of my font CDs, Font Pro 2, which had 150 typefaces. Font Pro 2 was followed by the 125 typefaces of Font Pro 3 (some of my best designs were on this one), and the 150 typefaces of Font Pro 5 (some of my weirdest designs were on this one). I earned almost nothing from the last of these CDs because in early 1996, just a few months after the Font Pro 5 was released, Wayzata went out of business&emdash;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 was my admission of that lack of marketing savvy: No-Hype Type CD. 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. The only thing that saved this venture was the advent of on-line auctions in about 1998. I eventually went to a second edition that was a CD-R version.

Everything has a season, and after a few years playing with on-line auctions, I moved to myfonts.com in 2002 as my distribution channel, and more recently have added fonts.com as a distributor. My fonts could almost always be found on ebay for several years, but not anymore, at least not legally.

Robert Schenk

updated Feb 2006

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altered Dec 2007