ITC Don't Panic's distressed shapes and craggy outlines evoke the feeling you get when you're just barely in control of a situation. This is type design on the edge. ITC Panic is further down the emotional track, when you've actually lost control and there is no hope in sight. Thompson says the inspiration for these faces arrived one day in the mail. I received an envelope that looked like it had a rough trip; the type that was stamped on it had a tired, ragged appearance. Ironically, the haggard envelope woke me up. I got excited and wanted to replicate the look as a font of type." Thompson designed ITC Don't Panic, then stood back and looked at it and decided it cried out for a more agitated companion. ITC Don't Panic gave birth to the positively psychotic offspring, ITC Panic. Both are all-cap designs with alternate characters in the unshift position. Creating an authentically disturbed appearance proved to be a challenge for Thompson. "I tried to design agitated characters, but they looked staged. So I tried multiple photocopies, but that didn't work. Eventually, I laser-printed the basic characters, wadded up the lasers, then flattened them out and stomped on them with heavy boots. The end result was scanned and used as the basis for the rest of the design." Thompson's work on web sites and multimedia has influenced his interest in type and typography that transcends the cool, unemotional nature of the computer."

ITC Don't Panic 's distressed shapes and craggy outlines evoke the feeling you get when you're just barely in control of a situation. This is type design on the edge. ITC Panic is further down the emotional track, when you've actually lost control and there is no hope in sight. Thompson says the inspiration for these faces arrived one day in the mail. I received an envelope that looked like it had a rough trip; the type that was stamped on it had a tired, ragged appearance. Ironically, the haggard envelope woke me up. I got excited and wanted to replicate the look as a font of type." Thompson designed ITC Don't Panic, then stood back and looked at it and decided it cried out for a more agitated companion. ITC Don't Panic gave birth to the positively psychotic offspring, ITC Panic. Both are all-cap designs with alternate characters in the unshift position. Creating an authentically disturbed appearance proved to be a challenge for Thompson. "I tried to design agitated characters, but they looked staged. So I tried multiple photocopies, but that didn't work. Eventually, I laser-printed the basic characters, wadded up the lasers, then flattened them out and stomped on them with heavy boots. The end result was scanned and used as the basis for the rest of the design." Thompson's work on web sites and multimedia has influenced his interest in type and typography that transcends the cool, unemotional nature of the computer."

Jim Rimmer’s first typeface was originally published in 1970 as a basic film type alphabet through a small, independent type house in central California. Its sources of influence (now calligraphic type standards by Dair, Goudy and Zapf) are ones that remained with Jim for the rest of his career. If you squint at Totemic in just the right way, you can see some recognizable themes Jim would later flesh out and make his own in later works throughout his career as a type designer and printer. Totemic is now available for the first time as a digital font, of the refined and expanded kind now expected from Canada Type. It comes with quite a few standard advanced typography features: Small caps, caps-to-small-caps, automatic fractions and standard ligatures, stylistic alternate sets, six kinds of figures, case-sensitive forms, and extended Latin language support. It also comes with a very unique and unprecedented feature: Variably stackable totem poles. Simply enable the discretionary ligatures feature, type any unique three-digit combination using numbers between 1 and 4, and watch the magic happens. With a name like Totemic, we just couldn't help ourselves. Many thanks to Andrew Steeves of Gaspereau Press for finding Jim’s lost gem in a most unexpected place, and for helping us bring it back to life 45 years after its analog birth. 20% of Totemic’s revenues will be donated to the Canada Type Scholarship Fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.