Thomas Phinney

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Thomas Phinney Font technology expert who runs his own type tech blog. Thomas Phinney (Portland, OR) has MS in printing from the Rochester (NY) Institute of Technology, and an MBA from UC Berkeley. He is freelance type consultant, font detective and type designer. Thomas Phinney was in Adobe's type group from 1997 until December 2008, mostly as Product Manager for Fonts&Global Typography, based in Seattle. At Adobe, he was involved in the technical, design, historical and business aspects of type, and worked closely with other font developers and customers. In 2008, he joined Extensis, where he was senior product manager for font solutions. In 2014, he joined the FontLab team, where he became Vice President and then CEO. In 2019, he left FontLab to become a full-time font detective. Phinney created Geode (2004, Adobe) and Hypatia Sans (2005-2007, Adobe, an elegant geometric sans family, complete with coverage of East European languages, Greek and Cyrillic). Hypatia Sans Pro (2009) is a more complete family that was finished with the help of Paul Hunt. In 2012, he started work on Cristoforo, a revival of Hermann Ihlenburg's Victorian typeface Columbus (1890, ATF) and its accompanying American Italic, also by Ihlenburg. Kickstarter project. Phinney notes that it is known as the typeface of Call of Cthulhu, the H.P. Lovecraft roleplaying game, and as the original logo for Cracker Jack. In 2013, Cristoforo Italic, a cooperation with Andrea Leksen, was shown at Leksen Design. In 2019, he worked on Science Gothic, a revival and mega-extension of Bank Gothic. He writes: Science Gothic is a variable font, designed for Google Fonts. Thomas Phinney based the regular master on Morris Fuller Benton's Bank Gothic (1930-1934), created for American Type Founders. Science Gothic builds on and extends Benton's design by adding a lowercase, dramatic variation in weight and width, and a contrast (YOPQ) axis, somewhat reminiscent of Benton's Broadway (1927) and other period designs such as R. Hunter Middleton's Radiant (circa 1938-1940) for Ludlow. The design was created by a team of designers: Thomas Phinney, Vassil Kateliev and Brandon Buerkle, with a little help from Igor Freiberger early on. See also Merom Sans (2019-2020) at OFL. At ATypI 2004 in Prague, he spoke about the demise of multiple masters, and the future of OpenType and type 1. At ATypI 2005 in Helsinki, he announced the phasing out of type 1 at Adobe. He has spoken at nearly all of the TypeTech parts of the annual ATypI meetings, and has been on the ATypI board since 2006. At ATypI 2008 in St. Petersburg, he spoke about web fonts and on OpenType. Speaker at ATypI 2010 in Dublin. His talk at ATypI 2011 in Reykjavik was entitled TSI: Type Scene Investigations. The title of his talk at ATypI 2013 in Amsterdam was Free Fonts: Threat, or Menace? Speaker at ATypI 2016 in Warsaw. Klingspor link.	EXTERNAL LINKS Thomas Phinney [Buy fonts] [Designer info] Klingspor Museum page MyFonts search Monotype search Fontspring search Google search INTERNAL LINKS Type personalities ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Greek/Coptic ⦿ Cyrillic type design ⦿ Type scene in Washington ⦿ Type blogs ⦿ The Canadian type scene ⦿ Victorian typefaces ⦿ Type scene in Oregon ⦿ Variable fonts ⦿