I released Scrubby on July 31, 2007. My goal was to bring back the Bookman Swash Italic that had been so common in the 1970s but was missing from the digital landscape. I built a clean version from scratch, scanning old catalogs and reconstructing the letters with punctuation and accents. Once that was complete, I added a distressed effect. I processed the outlines in Photoshop to create a fuzzy, antique quality that gave it the look of worn print.

Scrubby was always meant as a display typeface, full of exaggerated swashes and alternate letters. The alternates were programmed in OpenType to substitute automatically in context, so text would have variety and avoid repetition. The name came from GWG Scrubbies jeans, a brand I remembered wearing as a kid in the 1970s.

On August 27, 2021, I updated Scrubby by narrowing the ellipsis, improving the swash feature, and assigning Unicode values to alternate characters for easier access. It has always been a paid font. I never positioned it to compete with Mark Simonson’s Bookmania, which was a clean revival of the same genre. Scrubby’s purpose was different: to provide the fuzzy, vintage look that some designers specifically want.