This blog is about fonts, typography and text. It’s a mix of geeky troubleshooting, info for type designers and font makers, and thoughts for regular end users who happen to be curious about fonts and typography.
Thomas Phinney is a fonts and typography expert who does consulting and expert witness work, for which he is known as “The Font Detective.” He can be contacted via the form on thefontdetective.com.
Since 2004 he has been on the board of ATypI, the international typographic association (with a break from 2020–23). From 1997-2008 he did type at Adobe, lastly as product manager for fonts and global typography. After that he spent five years as senior technical product manager (a.k.a. “guru”) of fonts and typography at Extensis, including driving the WebINK web font solution. He then did five years at FontLab, as VP, then President, then CEO, including getting the very long-awaited FontLab 6 out the door.
The website is set in Phinney’s typeface Hypatia Sans, which is an Adobe Original (with help on the kerning from Robert Slimbach and Miguel Sousa, and final touches on the italic and last-minute character set expansion from Paul Hunt). He also made the Kickstarter-funded Cristoforo (with help on the italic from Andrea Leksen) and the Google-sponsored open source Science Gothic (with Vassil Kateliev and Brandon Buerkle).
Thomas has spoken at over a hundred conferences across North America, Europe and Asia, including ATypI, AIGA, TypeCon, WebVisions, the InDesign Conference, Adobe MAX, SXSW, and many others. He has long been involved in the design, technical, forensic, business, standards and history of type.