Phil Martin designed Grad for his personal use around 1990. It is a redesign of the classic Century Schoolboook. Changes both subtle and obvious have been made and many new features have been added such as small caps, old style figures, ligatures, and swash capitals. For ten years, Grad was trapped inside Phil's old DOS computer in an obsolete format. Working from laserprints provided by Phil and specimens of the original ATF Century Schoolbook, Mark Simonson has brought it into the 21st century as a family of three feature-rich OpenType fonts.