Tom Rickner.
Senior Director, Studio

Monotype Studio

In his words.

No matter how technology changes, we need to serve type as being the voice for the text.

Tom Rickner is Senior Director of the Studio with a career in type that spans more than three decades. During that time, he has mastered nearly every aspect of type design and font production, from his earliest days editing bitmaps, to designing some of the very first Multiple Master fonts for Adobe and TrueType GX Variations fonts for the Font Bureau and Apple, where he was also a pioneer of variable type.

Although he is likely most well-known for his hinting of Matthew Carter’s Georgia, Verdana, Tahoma and Nina typefaces for Microsoft, Tom’s expertise and passion is found at the intersection of design, tools and technology related to fonts, including variable font technology.

Tom has led or collaborated on the designs of fonts that include Arial, Bodoni, Broadway, Gallia, Goudy Forum Pro, Helvetica Now and Rebekah Pro, among others.

Tom leads the remarkable team of award-winning type designers that make up the Monotype Studio, as well as the many custom fonts designed for corporations and brands around the globe. He is a graduate of the School of Printing Management and Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and serves on the board of the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. He is also a member of the Type Directors Club.

Studio releases.

Thought leadership.

TYPO Brand Talk Panel.

Inside the Monotype studio.

From around the web.

TYPO Labs 2017

Tom Rickner and John Hudson jointly answering the current questions on trending font formats, current font technology and their lonely island fonts.

TYPO Talk

This talk will discuss lessons learned, current capabilities and limitations of Variations, and will conclude with a vision for what the future of this exciting technology could bring.

Fast Company

In 1989, Apple hired Thomas Rickner to do something revolutionary: put print-quality typefaces on every computer.

Tom Rickner