I released Dirty Baker’s Dozen on January 16, 1999. For years I thought it was based on a stencil, but later I realized I had scanned Clarendon from an old catalog, added strut lines in Photoshop, and then blurred and distorted the forms. The result was a distressed typeface with a tough, worn look. The name came from a now-defunct Canadian coffee franchise called Baker’s Dozen; there was a location near my office that was unusually grimy, which felt like a fitting match for the font’s character.

The original release included only a clean style and was distributed with a free commercial use license. On May 9, 2012, I issued a major update. That revision added two textured styles, Crisp and Hard, expanded the character set and language coverage, replaced spacing and kerning, and introduced kerning classes. I also added OpenType ligatures, guided by digraph and trigraph frequency lists, to create natural-looking variations in common letter combinations.

On October 28, 2024, I updated the family again. That version corrected reversed quotation marks, adjusted internal naming so the three styles would display properly in older applications, and fixed vector errors in the Spraypaint and Scorch styles. Dirty Baker’s Dozen has always been intended as a general-purpose distressed display typeface, suited to projects where a message needs extra grit. It has been used fairly often, though not in specific high-profile projects.