Miguel Sousa
Font Scientist at Adobe
San Jose, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMiguel Sousa is a Font Scientist and team leader with 13 years at Adobe, where he manages a small group of type designers and font developers responsible for some of the world’s most recognizable typefaces. He combines hands-on typeface design and production management with backend tooling expertise, contributing to major open-source projects like Adobe’s AFDKO and the fonttools/fontbakery suites to improve font format conversions, validation, and variable font checks. Trained at the University of Reading (MA, Typeface Design, Distinction) and with a background in graphic and web design, he bridges aesthetic judgment and engineering rigor to deliver robust, production-ready fonts. His work often focuses on subtle but critical details—glyph order handling, axis tables, and QA tests—that ensure fonts behave reliably across platforms. Based in San Jose, he pairs creative typographic sensibility with practical scripting and documentation skills, making him equally comfortable improving a glyph’s shape or the tools that build it.
14 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
MA, Typeface Design, Distinction, MA, Typeface Design, Distinction at The University of ReadingEngenharia Civil, Engenharia Civil at Instituto Superior TécnicoLicenciatura, Tecnologia e Artes Gráficas, Licenciatura, Tecnologia e Artes Gráficas at Instituto Politécnico de Tomar
English, Portuguese, Spanish
Github Skills (16)
quality-assurance10
variable-fonts10
enforcement10
opentype10
fonts10
fonttools10
ui-design10
python10
documentation10
testing10
scripting9
font-face9
css9
command-line-tool9
build-automation8
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
adobe-type-tools/afdko
Sep 2014 - Jan 2023
Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:119 releases, 12 reviews, 771 commits in 8 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Miguel focused on the development of tools for processing and manipulating fonts. Their work primarily involved writing Python scripts to handle the conversion between different font formats, improve compatibility between them, and implement utility functionalities. They improved the handling of character glyphs by implementing support for a new glyph order, and ensured the stability and completeness of the font files in their work by incorporating and documenting the necessary attributes.
opentype
adobe-fonts/source-sans
Aug 2012 - Sep 2019
Sans serif font family for user interface environments
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:8 releases, 246 commits, 10 PRs in 7 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Miguel's contributions primarily involve updating and maintaining the `SourceSansProReadMe.html` file. The changes include updating release notes, providing font version information, detailing family information, and adding documentation for menu names and style linking. The updates also reflect character additions and bug fixes.
font-familyopentype-fontsotfafdkottf-fonts
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