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.