Chank started selling fonts door-to-door as The Travelling Font Salesman in 1995. His fonts were featured in the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum as a notable example of contemporary typography in 1996, the same year he established www.chank.com. Chank started 1997 with a business manager, a board of directors, and papers that declared his business a corporation. By the end of the year, he was profiled in The Wall Street Journal, complete with etched portrait. He is currently the President and CEO of The Chank Company, a Minneapolis-based design firm specializing in fonts.

Chank's worldwide fame for the alphabet doesn't end with fonts. Since 1995, the Minneapolis designer has been churning out quirky alphabetic illustrations and paintings - including his interpretation of Gainsborough's Blue Boy - with a hope to beat Picasso's Guinness Book record by creating more than a million pieces in his lifetime. As of February 2004, Chank's pieces number more than 12,100.

Chank also served on the Board of Directors of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association, a non-profit organization best known for presenting the annual Art-A-Whirl studio & gallery tour.