ITC Arid grew naturally out of the flowing highly flourished style of calligraphy that St. Louis lettering artist Rob Leuschke has been practicing since 1981. Leuschke created ITC Arid because he felt that “a really rough-edged dry-brushed font was something that you don't often see.” Leuschke used a camel-hair bristle brush to draw the shapes on cold-press Strathmore Watercolor paper then scanned them into Photoshop and tweaked the shapes reducing the number of points to a manageable amount while keeping the effect of the dry brush on the highly textured paper. The name “Arid” of course comes from the dry-brush technique.