Larabie was born in
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. In his self-published autobiography, he states that he spent much of his childhood in the
cottage country of the
Ottawa Valley, an isolated environment that did not allow him to have traditional friendships or social activities, and thus spent much of his time learning computers and typography; he graduated from
Sheridan College with a degree in
classical animation, a field that was largely obsolete by the time he received his degree. Larabie was employed at
Rockstar Canada and had contributed his designs to multiple
video game titles, including the hit series'
Grand Theft Auto and
Max Payne, before he quit the company in 2002 to focus full-time on
type design, after having released a series of
freeware fonts over the Internet under the brand LarabieFonts since 1996. Larabie worked as a video-game artist at Rockstar Toronto until 2002. While he did not design fonts for the company directly, his 1999 Pricedown font was later used in the logo of the Grand Theft Auto series. Two of his typeface families, Marion and
Superclarendon, are released with
macOS. Larabie's "Canada 150" is an extended version of his previous font Mesmerize (in turn based on 1920s calligraphic German sans-serifs such as
Semplicità,
Nobel and
Kabel) with
Cyrillic and First Nations alphabets included; it was commissioned by the
Government of Canada to be the official typeface for the country's
sesquicentennial. The government paid him nothing for the custom work, which he subsequently placed into the
public domain. He would proceed to release large portions of his Larabie Fonts library (inasmuch as he could, since some of the designs were derived from freeware that turned out to be copyrighted and thus could not be re-released), along with less successful designs for Typodermic, into the public domain in 2020, 2022 and 2024. He noted that when he had previously attended typography conferences, he had received the cold shoulder from attendees who felt he was threatening their business. Permanence was chosen for the 2023 reissue of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. Sinzano was used in King's Crown organic tea packaging. Hoverunit appeared in the bilingual monograph Dia Al-Azzawi, and Carouselambra was used in posters for Amsterdam's Freak Festival. ==Notable Typefaces==