I released Duality on March 11, 2000. The name was arbitrary; it didn’t carry any special meaning for me. What made the project unusual was the way it was produced. I drew each character on a Palm Pilot PDA using its tiny monochrome screen and a basic drawing app with only a pen and eraser tool. Because the screen resolution was low and the pen sensitivity wasn’t ideal for precise control, the letterforms came out rough and irregular. I couldn’t see the other characters while working—each was stored separately in the device’s RAM—so the font carried inconsistencies I wouldn’t have allowed in a normal workflow. My original intent was to make a compact Clarendon-style face, but the process turned it into something more eccentric.

Back at my computer, I autotraced the Palm Pilot drawings into vector outlines and assembled them into a font. At first, I only released the Regular style, which was free for commercial use. A few years later, I added two textured versions as paid options. The Steel style used photographs of rusted metal to create an uneven corrosion texture, while the Sand style applied a soft, grainy outline based on the Exposure plug-in’s procedural film grain texture.

Duality was always a display typeface. It never saw notable use, but for me it was more about exploring the limits of early mobile technology in type design. The constraints dictated the shapes and gave the font its idiosyncratic character.