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

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 Co ...

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 t ...

, Verdana, and Tahoma typeface families, commissioned by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

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 lapt ...

. 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: th ...

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

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

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 for laser printers. In 1989, Rickner began working for

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 b ...

, 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 QuickDraw GX was a replacement for the QuickDraw (QD) 2D graphics engine and Printing Manager inside the classic Mac OS. Its underlying drawing platform was a resolution-independent object oriented retained mode system, making it much easier for ...

. 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 fon ...

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. 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 ...

in Elk Grove Village, 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 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 *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