TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Tue Aug 26 11:23:12 EDT 2025

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ABOUT

Source Foundry [Chris Simpkins]

Christopher Eric Simpkins (1974-2025), of Hanover, NH, grew up in Gainesville, Florida, and attended the University of Florida. He earned his medical degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Quoting from his obituary, Chrise was a skilled and dedicated transplant surgeon whose work saved many lives. His gentle bedside manner and concern for his patients and colleagues earned him respect and admiration throughout his career. Chris was honored with numerous teaching awards and affectionately known by colleagues and patients as the Gentle Giant for his calm, kind demeanor. In recent years, he served as a Senior User Experience Program Manager at Google, with a special interest in font development. Chris initiated and guided the creation of Google Sans Code, a new brand font designed specifically for reading and writing code, and he program-managed the design and development of other Google font families that were recognized with both internal and international design awards. Throughout his time at Google, Chris led a broad network of vendors and partnered with teams across the company to integrate these fonts to major Google platforms.

As the principal of Source Foundry in Baltimore, MD, he wrote these free font tools:

• font-unicode. A command line application that performs searches for Unicode character names by Unicode code points, and for Unicode code points by character names. It supports the Unicode standard v8.0.0. The query results are supplemented with the Adobe Glyph List for New Fonts v1.7 glyph names where applicable.
• compare-typefaces. Simple browser tool to compare a string between several typefaces, intended to judge the legibility of easily confusable glyphs.
• ufodiff. A command line UFO source file diff tool for collaborative typeface development projects.
• ufolint. A source file linter for typeface development in Unified Font Object (UFO) source code. It was designed for continuous integration testing of UFO source contributions to typeface projects.
• font-line: OpenType vertical metrics reporting and font line spacing adjustment tool.
• font-ttfa: A command line TTFA table reporting tool for fonts hinted with ttfautohint.
• fontname.py: Font renaming script for otf and ttf fonts.
• font-tables: An OpenType font table reporting tool for ttf and otf font files.

In addition, Chris designed the free programming font Hack (2018).

Github link. Use Modify link. Official obituary.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Source Foundry
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Unified Font Object ⦿ Font software ⦿ Open source fonts ⦿ Fonts for programming ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ OpenType software ⦿ Truetype font software ⦿ Type scene in Florida ⦿ Type scene in New Hampshire ⦿ Type scene in Maryland ⦿