Tom Rickner.
Senior Director, 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.

Helvetica Now

Everyone. Everywhere. Everything.

Helvetica® Now is a new chapter in the story of perhaps the best-known typeface of all time. Available in three optical sizes—Micro, Text, and Display—every character in Helvetica Now has been redrawn and refit; with a variety of useful alternates added.

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Goudy Forum Pro™

A revival and dramatic expansion.

The Goudy Forum font began more than 30 years ago while Tom Rickner was a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Tom printed a type specimen using the Forum Title foundry hot metal types. Then in 1993 Tom began to digitize the font from that specimen while working as an independent type designer. Fifteen years passed before Tom dusted off the digital data and began working in earnest on font with a full Latin 1 character set. Steve Matteson, type director at Ascender, encouraged Tom to take this font further still, and soon the glyph repertoire and feature set blossomed to a robust Pro font with a myriad of advanced typographic OpenType features.

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Rebekah Pro™

Elegance and distinction.

Rebekah Pro is 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.

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Thought leadership.

TYPO Brand Talk Panel.

Inside the Monotype studio.

From around the web.

Creative Characters podcast.

S2 E9: Nathan Lance – How to build an (authentic) sustainable brand.

Emilios chats with Nathan Lance on the podcast, creative director at Leap, a B Corp certified design agency in Truro, England.

Monotype x Middlesex.

Middlesex University typography module.

Phil Garnham and Emilios Theofanous, had the opportunity to host two online sessions, initially to help kickoff the project and a later session during the semester to discuss the process, critique the designs and answer any type design related questions.

Correos.

Custom type for Correos.

Correos, national postal service, is a brand of more than 350 years. Together with branding agency, Summa, we designed a new font exclusively for Correos, named Cartero (Postman) in honour of the emblematic professionals that has shaped the company since its early days.