This blog is about fonts, typography and text. It’s a mix of geeky troubleshooting, info for font developers and thoughts for regular end users who happen to be curious about typography.

Thomas Phinney is a font and typography expert and consultant, who can be reached by email as tphinney at the cal.berkeley.edu domain (they do free email for alumni). An expert witness work and consulting page is coming soon.

In his day job, which he also moonlights from, Thomas is senior technical product manager (a.k.a. “guru”) of fonts and typography (at Extensis, including managing the font library for the WebINK web font solution. He is also treasurer of ATypI, the international typographic association. From 1997-​​2008 he did type at Adobe, lastly as product manager for fonts and global typography. His typeface Hypatia Sans is an Adobe Original (with help from Robert Slimbach, Miguel Sousa and Paul Hunt).

Thomas has spoken at about a hundred conferences across North America, Europe and Asia, including ATypI, AIGA, TypeCon, WebVisions, the InDesign Conference, Adobe MAX, and many others. He has long been involved in the design, technical, forensic, business, standards and history of type. His interest in forensic typography has led to testifying as an expert witness in court, being quoted in newspapers from the Washington Post to the Dallas Morning News, and being consulted by organizations ranging from PBS (for History Detectives) to FontLab Ltd to the US Treasury Department. Phinney has an MS in printing from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

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