Thomas Phinney
Font Detective, Expert Witness, Type Designer, Consultant, Writer at TheFontDetective.com
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThomas Phinney is a font specialist, expert witness, type designer and consultant who has carved out a unique niche as "The Font Detective," applying typographic and forensic analysis to legal disputes and document authentication. He advises publishers and tech companies—clients have included Oxford University Press, Google and Microsoft—and his expert-witness work has been featured by BBC, Wired, NPR and The Washington Post. A hands-on designer and former FontLab CEO and Adobe product manager, he builds advanced type technology (including multi-axis variable fonts with thousands of glyphs) and recently contracted on Google's Material Symbols variable icon fonts. His own typeface, Hypatia Sans, was used as an Adobe Creative Suite registration incentive, and he teaches and writes about global typography, font workflows and legal compliance. Based in Portland, Oregon, he combines an MS in Printing/Typography and an MBA from UC Berkeley with an investigative curiosity that routinely uncovers subtle typographic evidence in forgery and compliance cases.
11 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
MS, Printing / typography, MS, Printing / typography at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)MBA, Business, MBA, Business at University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business
Stackoverflow
36reputation
5kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (116)
windows10
material-design-icons10
material-ui10
phonetics10
woff210
javascript10
react-components10
divider10
cjk10
dart10
science10
opentype10
fonts10
quality-assurance10
cross-platform10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
googlefonts/science-gothic
Jul 2019 - Aug 2022
Science Gothic, a libre variable font
Contributions:388 commits, 2 PRs, 369 pushes in 3 years 2 months
sciencegoogle-fontslibrefontgothic
tphinney/font-tools
Mar 2014 - Dec 2016
Contributions:30 commits, 5 pushes, 3 comments in 2 years 9 months
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