Thomas Rickner (born October 8, 1966, Rochester, New York) is an American type designer who, while Lead Typographer at

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

, supervised the production of the first

TrueType TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating sy ...

fonts released in 1991 as part of Apple’s

System 7 System 7, codenamed "Big Bang", and also known as Mac OS 7, is a graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers and is part of the classic Mac OS series of operating systems. It was introduced on May 13, 1991, by Apple C ...

operating system for the Macintosh.Font Bureau People , Thomas Rickner
/ref> Rickner provided TrueType production and font hinting of Matthew Carter’s

Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to the ...

Verdana Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typograph ...

, and Tahoma typeface families, commissioned by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

and widely distributed in the Windows operating system and Apple’s

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

. Rickner’s original type designs include Amanda, Buffalo Gal and Hamilton. Rickner began his career in type design in 1987 as a

bitmap In computing, a bitmap is a mapping from some domain (for example, a range of integers) to bits. It is also called a bit array or bitmap index. As a noun, the term "bitmap" is very often used to refer to a particular bitmapping application: t ...

editor for

Omnipage OmniPage is an optical character recognition (OCR) application available from Kofax Incorporated. OmniPage was one of the first OCR programs to run on personal computers. It was developed in the late 1980s and sold by Caere Corporation, a company ...

Corporation, of Rochester, New York. In 1988, he was graduated from the

Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a private research university in the town of Henrietta in the Rochester, New York, metropolitan area. The university offers undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional ...

School of Printing Management and Sciences with a bachelor's degree, and started at QMS/Imagen Corporation, a laser printer manufacturer in Santa Clara, California. There, under the direction of noted type designer Charles Bigelow, Rickner worked in the production and hand

font hinting Font hinting (also known as instructing) is the use of mathematical instructions to adjust the display of an outline font so that it lines up with a rasterized grid. At low screen resolutions, hinting is critical for producing clear, legible tex ...

for laser printers. In 1989, Rickner began working for Apple, Inc., where he served as Lead Typographer for two years. In addition to supervising production of the first

fonts released by Apple, Rickner also worked on the early development of TrueType GX. In 1992, Rickner began freelance type design work for The Font Bureau, Inc. collaborating on the development of several projects, including the Graphite and Tekton

Multiple master fonts Multiple master fonts (or MM fonts) are an extension to Adobe Systems' Type 1 PostScript fonts, now superseded by the advent of OpenType and, in particular, the introduction of OpenType Font Variations in OpenType 1.8, also called variable f ...

for Adobe Systems and a revival and expansion of

William Addison Dwiggins William Addison Dwiggins (June 19, 1880 – December 25, 1956), was an American type designer, calligrapher, and book designer. He attained prominence as an illustrator and commercial artist, and he brought to the designing of type and books so ...

’ Eldorado family for

Premiere Magazine A première, also spelled premiere, is the debut (first public presentation) of a play, film, dance, or musical composition. A work will often have many premières: a world première (the first time it is shown anywhere in the world), its first ...

. Rickner joined Monotype Corporation in July 1994, and in 2004, became a founding partner of

Ascender Corporation Ascender Corporation was a digital typeface foundry and software development company located in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois in the United States. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers, and font ...

Elk Grove Village Elk Grove Village is a village in Cook and DuPage counties in the U.S. state of Illinois. Per the 2020 census, the population was 32,812. Located northwest of Chicago along the Golden Corridor, the Village of Elk Grove Village was incorpora ...

, Illinois. Rickner is developing fonts for the Ascender Compact Asian Font format (ACAF), and has designed fonts for the Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Thai, Thaana and Cherokee scripts, among others. Most recently, Rickner was involved in the development of Microsoft’s

ClearType ClearType is Microsoft's implementation of subpixel rendering technology in rendering text in a font system. ClearType attempts to improve the appearance of text on certain types of computer display screens by sacrificing color fidelity for addit ...

font collectionDesign News – First ClearType Font Pack for Microsoft Office Released – TAXI Design Network
/ref> and spent nearly two years engineering the Japanese font

Meiryo is a Japanese sans-serif gothic typeface. Microsoft bundled Meiryo with Office Mac 2008 as part of the standard install, and it replaces MS Gothic as the default system font for Vista on Japanese systems. Meiryo was created out of a growing ...

included with Windows Vista.

External links

*http://www.fonts.com/aboutfonts/designerprofiles/tomrickner.htm *http://www.identifont.com/show?5L9 *http://www.fontshop.com/fonts/designer/thomas_a_rickner/ *http://www.linotype.com/3237/tomrickner.html *http://www.will-harris.com/msfont-hint.htm *http://www.monotypefonts.com/Foundry/DesignerProfiles.asp?show=rickner

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rickner, Thomas 1966 births Living people Artists from Rochester, New York American graphic designers

See also

External links

References