In the words of Craig Stainton, founder of SelfBuildtype:

My interest in lettering started when I was a kid in my home town of Newcastle. Graffiti was my introduction to lettering and for a while I was a graffiti tagger, practising new letter styles and shapes. This later developed into an interest in type design at Leeds Metropolitan University, where I was inspired by the crop of new type designers using Fontographer, foundries such as Emigre and Brody’s FUSE experiments. I started to design my own fonts to use on techno record labels and other projects. SelfBuild was born of necessity; I often found the fonts available to me were not suitable for the job in hand and so constructed or designed my own.

In the words of Craig Stainton, founder of SelfBuildtype: