Thomas Phinney
Type tech, sometime typographer & writer
I am a lover of type who is lucky enough to have a steady job in the industry. Participating in ATypI as an Adobe representative for the last few years has given me the opportunity to learn more first-hand the challenges facing type designers, type foundries, and type users, as well as to evangelize the new solutions my company favors for font formats and applications.
Before, during and after finishing my BA in psychology and political science from the University of Alberta, Canada (in my home town of Edmonton), I was always involved in desktop publishing and typography, starting in the mid-80s. Whether it was manufacturing clues for murder mystery dinner theatre (along with acting, writing and directing), or doing layout for aUniversity paper (while also being news editor), somehow I always did layout and typography. Eventually I made the tough call to go into type rather than journalism (sorry, Columbia and Northwestern!), and went to Rochester, New York, where I got my MS in graphic arts publishing, specializing in design and typography, from RIT in 1997.
Along the way, I wrote a reasonably popular article on font formats called "PostScript Type 1, TrueType and OpenType: What's the Difference?" and a secton of the comp.fonts FAQ called "A Brief History of Type." The first one I have kept up-to-date, and the second I am no longer particularly proud of, but both are still available on-line. I also learned TrueType hinting from Tom Rickner at Monotype, and wrote a TrueType hinting tutorial for Microsoft, which I don't think ever saw the light of day afterwards.
Since the summer of 1997, I have been part of the type group at Adobe Systems in San Jose. In 1999, I became the program manager for western-language fonts. Since then, we have released hundreds of western-language OpenType "Pro" fonts, followed by converting the remainder of the entire Adobe Type Library into OpenType, which was released in several chunks in 2002.
Along the way, I have learned that I am truly interested in all aspects of type: art, history, technology and business. Besides finishing a part-time MBA from UC Berkeley (May 2003), in my spare time I design typefaces, research historical type oddities, and once in a while lend type expertise in court cases.