Thomas Phinney is a board member and former president of ATypI, type designer and font forensics specialist. As a type designer, he has created fonts for Adobe and Google. Phinney is involved in the business of type, having been product manager for fonts at Adobe and Extensis, and CEO of FontLab. He has four patents, an MS in printing/typography from RIT, and an MBA from UC Berkeley. Phinney did his Master’s thesis on “Extreme Form Change in Multiple Master Fonts,” a precursor to variable font technology. He designed Adobe Original typeface Hypatia Sans, and his team’s open-source typeface Science Gothic is a 4-axis variable font commissioned by Google Fonts. With Vassil Kateliev, he produces and maintains Google’s 4-axis Material Symbols variable font, with about 4000 icons. Phinney has been on the board of ATypI for most of the years since 2004, and has served as President, VP, secretary, and especially treasurer. Phinney serves on ATypI’s governance, finance and conference program committees. Phinney views being an ATypI board member as a way to serve the typographic community, in appreciation for a career he loves.
