Thomas Phinney
Portland, Oregon
Thomas Phinney is a type designer, font technologist, and the world’s only practicing font forensics specialist. Known to many in the InDesign community from his previous IDUG presentations—OpenType Functionality in InDesign and The Future of Fonts in InDesign: Variable Fonts and Color Fonts—he brings a designer-focused perspective that bridges typography, software, and real-world practice.
During his eleven years at Adobe (1997–2008), Phinney helped lead the conversion of the entire Adobe Type Library to OpenType, shaping capabilities that designers now take for granted across modern layout tools. He has also worked on the business side of type as product manager for fonts at both Adobe and Extensis, and later served as CEO of FontLab.
Phinney holds four patents, an MS in Printing and Typography from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. A longtime leader in the global type community, he has served on the board of ATypI for 18 of the past 21 years, including a term as President.
His typeface designs include Hypatia Sans for Adobe (with assistance from Paul Hunt on the italic) and Science Gothic for Google (with major contributions from Vassil Kateliev and Brandon Buerkle). Today he continues to work in type design and font production while running an active consulting practice as a “font detective,” investigating typographic issues that intersect with the law—such as forged backdated documents created with fonts that did not yet exist, or failures to meet legally required point sizes. Defendants in his cases have included Zazzle, among others.
