TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Apr 15 05:30:49 EDT 2024

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ABOUT

Thomas A. Rickner

American type designer, born in Rochester in 1966, who has worked for various foundries including Monotype. He graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He lives in Madison, WI, and is currently employed by Monotype, after a short period at Ascender. He co-designed a revival of W.A. Dwiggins' beautiful Eldorado family, Amanda (1996), Hamilton, the Western font Buffalo Gal (1992-1994, TTGX variations font done while he was at Apple). He worked at Monotype from 1994 onwards, where he hinted Carter's Georgia, Tahoma, Nina and Verdana fonts, for example, commissioned by Microsoft. While employed by Apple Computer, Tom oversaw the development of the first TrueType fonts to ship with Apples System 7. He worked on a freelance basis for Font Bureau for the last 12 years. He has worked on custom font solutions for companies such as Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lexmark, Lotus, Microsoft and Nokia. His custom fonts include a revival of Bodoni to serve Lexmark as their new corporate typeface. His experience with non-Latin scripts is broad, having designed fonts for the Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Thai, Thaana and Cherokee scripts. Tom also played a key role in the development of fonts for Agfa Monotype's proprietary stroke font format. In his own words, However I did the bulk of the drawing for Siegel's Graphite, and I did about 1/2 of the Tekton MultipleMaster (with Jill Pichotta and Tobias Frere-Jones on the other half of the masters) while in Palo Alto. In 2004, he co-founded Ascender Corporation, where he published

• Arial Mono (Ascender).
• Buffalo Gals (1992 and 2016): Buffalo Gals is one of the very first variable fonts, originally made in 1992 for an Apple TrueType GX developer CD. It was intended to push the boundaries on the number of stylistic axes in a font, with 6 axes in total, none of them being weight or width. Based upon wood type of the late 1800s, Buffalo Gals enables control over features with names like Cookies, Fringe, Hooves, Concavity and Bracketing. It offers 144 distinct combinations of these attributes, and seemingly infinite intermediate interpolations as well. Free download here.
• Circus Poster Shadow (2005): based an 1890s Tuscan style wood type.
• Goudy Borders (2009) and Goudy Forum Pro (2009), a revival and expansion Frederic W. Goudy's "Forum Title" (1911, inspired by Roman inscriptions on the Trajan's column monument).
• Hamilton (Ascender). A wood type face.
• Rebekah Pro (2006): a revival of ATF's Piranesi family, the regular being designed by Willard Sniffin, and the remaining weights designed by Morris Fuller Benton. Tom Rickner first revived Benton's Italic for use in his wedding invitations for his marriage to Rebekah Zapf in 2006. He completed the character set in 2009.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Thomas A. Rickner
 [Designer info]
Klingspor Museum page
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INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type scene in Wisconsin ⦿ Architectural lettering/typefaces ⦿ Type scene in New York ⦿ Wood Type ⦿ Modern style [Bodoni, Didot, Walbaum, Thorowgood, Computer Modern, etc.] ⦿ Typefaces inspired by the Trajan column in Rome ⦿ Monospaced fonts ⦿ Frederic William Goudy ⦿ Circus fonts ⦿ Variable fonts ⦿ Western fonts ⦿ Tuscan fonts ⦿