Jim Rimmer (April 1, 1934 – January 9, 2010) was a Canadian

graphic designer A graphic designer is a practitioner who follows the discipline of graphic design, either within companies or organizations or independently. They are professionals in design and visual communication, with their primary focus on transforming ...

letterpress Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing for producing many copies by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against individual sheets of paper or a continuous roll of paper. A worker composes and locks movable t ...

printer, proprietor of the Pie Tree Press and is especially notable as a designer of

typefaces A typeface (or font family) is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, bold), slope (e.g., italic), width ...

Biography

Jim Rimmer was born on 1 April 1934 and was raised in

Vancouver Vancouver is a major city in Western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the cit ...

, British Columbia, Canada. He attended Vancouver Technical School, "which gave an introduction to metal type and presses through the school's large printing trade shop." After an apprenticeship he began a long period of working with type and design for newspaper publication and printing, all in

British Columbia British Columbia is the westernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Situated in the Pacific Northwest between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains, the province has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that ...

. Rimmer attended evening classes to study graphic design at Vancouver School of Art. "During his freelance years he worked on projects for the major agencies and design studios in Vancouver, for corporations, airlines, mining and forestry companies. A large part of his work entailed letter design and lettering projects." Along with his long career as a designer, Rimmer taught at several colleges including Capilano College, ECIAD, Langara College, Kwantlen College, Richmond and UCFV, Abbotsford. For a brief time in the 1970s, Rimmer was type director of the Lanston Monotype Corporation in Vancouver. Rimmer was noted as the proprietor of the Pie Tree Press, located in

New Westminster New Westminster (colloquially known as New West) is a city in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia, Canada, and a member municipality of the Metro Vancouver Regional District. It was founded by Major-General Richard Moody as the cap ...

, a printing office for which he designed many typefaces in metal, including Albertan, Kaatskill and Stern. The

P22 Type Foundry P22 Type Foundry is a digital type foundry and letterpress printing studio based in Rochester, New York. The company was created in 1994 in Buffalo, New York by co-founders Richard Kegler and Carima El-Behairy. The company is best known for its t ...

marketed Rimmer's typefaces as the Rimmer Type Foundry until July 1, 2012, when it was announced that the rights to Rimmer's work were acquired by Canada Type. Over 200 digital faces, distributed among 18 families, have been made from Rimmer's designs. In 2007, Rimmer received the honor of becoming a fellow of the

Society of Graphic Designers of Canada Design Professionals of Canada (or DesCan, formerly known as the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, or GDC) is Canadaʼs national certification body for graphic and communication design and since 1956 has established standards for design pro ...

. In 2010, Rimmer was awarded the Robert R. Reid Award for lifetime achievement or extraordinary contributions to the book arts in Canada from the Alcuin Society. Rimmer died of

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving Cell growth#Disorders, abnormal cell growth with the potential to Invasion (cancer), invade or Metastasis, spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Po ...

on January 8, 2010.

Books

* Rimmer, Jim, ''Leaves from the Pie Tree Press'', Pie Tree Press, 2006.http://www.wlbooks.com/cgi-bin/wlb455.cgi/36722.html

References

External links

Rimmer Type Foundry at the P22 Type Foundry website

Jim Rimmer typefaces at MyFonts

*
Portrait of Jim Rimmer
– Linocut of Jim Rimmer by Andrea Taylor, from the UBC Library Digital Collections.
Records of Jim Rimmer and Pie Tree Press are held by Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rimmer, Jim 1934 births 2010 deaths Deaths from cancer in British Columbia Canadian graphic designers Canadian typographers and type designers Langara College people

Biography

Books

Further reading

References

External links