I released Desperate on June 26, 2009, as a commercial typeface intended to capture the rough energy of punk and new wave graphics. The design relied on simple letterforms, but the effect came from an extensive OpenType system. I created more than 200 contextual ligatures by hand, so the letters lock together in different ways depending on the sequence. This produces a varied and unpredictable rhythm, closer to improvised paste-up graphics than to standard digital typesetting.

The name comes from “We’re Desperate,” a song by the Los Angeles punk band X, which suited the tone I was after. The interlocking shapes emphasize the crowded, aggressive quality of the style, and the ligatures prevent it from feeling repetitive.

On June 18, 2021, I updated Desperate. That revision removed deprecated characters, corrected inconsistencies, replaced reversed quotation marks with proper forms while keeping the old ones accessible through Unicode, expanded the fractions feature, and adjusted vertical metrics for better browser compatibility. The typeface has not been revised further and has not appeared in notable projects, but it remains a compact record of my interest in translating the cut-and-paste look of late twentieth-century graphics into a digital form.