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 corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Comput ...

, supervised the production of the first

TrueType TrueType is an Computer font#Outline fonts, outline font standardization, standard developed by Apple Inc., Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe Inc., Adobe's PostScript fonts#Type 1, Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the ...

fonts released in 1991 as part of Apple’s

System 7 System 7 (later named Mac OS 7) is the seventh major release of the classic Mac OS operating system for Macintosh computers, made by Apple Computer. It was launched on May 13, 1991, to succeed System 6 with virtual memory, personal file shari ...

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 South Caucasus * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the southeastern United States Georgia may also refer to: People and fictional characters * Georgia (name), a list of pe ...

, Verdana, and Tahoma typeface families, commissioned by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

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, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

. 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 (also called raster) graphic is an image formed from rows of different colored pixels. A GIF is an example of a graphics image file that uses a bitmap. As a noun, the term "bitmap" is very often used to refer to a partic ...

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

Rochester Institute of Technology The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a private university, private research university in Henrietta, New York, a suburb of Rochester, New York, Rochester. It was founded in 1829. It is one of only two institute of technology, institut ...

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 t ...

for laser printers. In 1989, Rickner began working for

Apple, Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Com ...

, 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 fonts ...

for

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), formerly Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American software, computer software company based in San Jose, California. It offers a wide range of programs from web design tools, photo manipulation and vector creation, through to ...

and a revival and expansion of William Addison Dwiggins’ Eldorado family for

Premiere Magazine A premiere, also spelled première, (from , ) is the debut (first public presentation) of a work, i.e. play, film, dance, musical composition, or even a performer in that work. History Raymond F. Betts attributes the introduction of the film ...

. Rickner joined

Monotype Corporation Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., founded as Lanston Monotype Machine Company in 1887 in Philadelphia by Tolbert Lanston, is an American (historically Anglo-American) company that specializes in digital typesetting and typeface design for use wit ...

in July 1994, and in 2004, became a founding partner of

Ascender Corporation Ascender Corporation was a digital typeface foundry and software development company in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers, and people previously involved in dev ...

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 incorpor ...

, 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 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
Monotype

References

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

See also

External links

References