Thomas Phinney
Portland, Oregon
Thomas Phinney has been involved with variable fonts and their precursors for decades, including before and after his 11 years at Adobe. He did his Master’s thesis on Extreme Form Change in Multiple Master Fonts, a precursor to modern variable font technology. Phinney designed Adobe Original typeface Hypatia Sans, and his team’s open-source typeface Science Gothic is a 4-axis variable font commissioned by Google Fonts. With Vassil Kateliev, he created and maintains a 4-axis variable font version of Google’s Material Design icons, the public open-source version of which is called Material Symbols, and has over 3600 icons.
In his time at Adobe (1997–2008), Phinney helped lead the conversion of the entire Adobe Type Library to OpenType. Phinney is also involved in the business of type, having been product manager for fonts at Adobe and Extensis, and CEO of FontLab. He has four patents, an MS in printing/typography from RIT, and an MBA from UC Berkeley. Phinney was on the board of the global typography association, ATypI, for more than 18 years, including a term as President and 15 years on the executive.
Phinney also has an active business as the world’s only consulting font detective, investigating those crimes against typography that are actually illegal, such as forging backdated documents using fonts that did not yet exist, or failing to meet a legally required point size. Defendants in his cases have included Justin Timberlake, will.i.am and the billionaire Russian oligarch who owns the largest private home in London.
