Thomas Rickner began his career in type design in 1987 as a bitmap editor for Omnipage Corporation, located near Rochester, New York. In 1988 he graduated from RIT’s School of Printing Management and Sciences with a Bachelor’s degree, and started work at QMS/Imagen Corporation, a laser printer manufacturer in Santa Clara, California. There, under the direction of noted type designer Charles Bigelow, he worked in the production and hinting of outline fonts for laser printers.

In the fall of 1989 Rickner joined Apple Computer, Inc. as lead typographer, supervising the production of the first TrueType fonts released with System 7, and working on the early development of TrueType GX. After two years at Apple, he began freelance type design work for The Font Bureau, Inc. where he produced custom TrueType, TrueType GX, PostScript Type 1 and Multiple Master fonts for clients such as Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and Prodigy.

Rickner joined Monotype Typography, Inc. in July of 1994. His work there has involved the conversion of Monotype’s world renowned PostScript library to TrueType, as well as developing custom fonts for companies such as Lotus, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft. He continues to design original typefaces as time permits, some of which should be available for retail release in the coming months.