Designed in 1988 by Tony Watson, it was the second in a series, and complements the lighter ‘Chalkline’ which was released the year before. Tony Watson is a British designer who is especially talented at brush style lettering and whose other Fontek fonts include ‘Laura’ and Highlight'.

Chalkline Bold is, as its name suggests a chalk effect design and was originally digitised in the late 1980s using the Ikarus system but the complexity of the design meant that at that time it could not be produced as a digital font as the technical limitations of the printers and operating systems would not allow it. The Letraset Type Studio developed a technique for converting complex type designs into digital font formats but the interior decoration and rough edged effect of Chalkline Bold was just too much for the low memory laser printers of that era.

The physical size of the font is much larger than any other typeface released by Letraset, and some characters have over 2000 digitisation points.