Designed in 1997–98 by Jens Gehlhaar as his graduate thesis at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), with consultation by Ed Fella, Jeffery Keedy, Lorraine Wild, Jonathan Hoefler, Just van Rossum, Erik van Blokland.

CIA Compendium is an anthology of letterform skeletons found in sources “ranging from 15th-century italics to geometric display faces, from Art Nouveau oddities to Apple system fonts”. The harmonized system of 700 glyphs — with 5–10 alternates per character — is organized in 5 fonts: “CIA Humdrum unites all the earmark characters of widely used sans serifs. CIA Earthworm includes typefaces specially designed for Optical Character Recognition, space-saving printing, low-res output systems or mechanical typewriters. CIA Dictator collects lettershapes oppressed by their designer’s application of simple geometric principles. CIA Dogsear is an upright monochrome version of the italics of traditional book typefaces, while CIA Antigill is comprised of anti-classical shapes taken from Art Nouveau faces, Letraset and phototype display catalogs.” — Jens Gehlhaar