Thomas Rickner began his career in type design in 1987 as a bitmap editor for Omnipage Corporation, located just outside of Rochester, New York. In 1988 he was graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology, 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, he worked in the production and hinting of outline fonts for laser printers.

In the fall of 1989 Tom left QMS to work for Apple Computer, Inc, where as the lead typographer, he was instrumental in the production of the first TrueType fonts released with System 7. Tom also worked on the early development of TrueType GX. After two years at Apple, Tom left to pursue freelance type design work for The Font Bureau, Inc. There, he produced custom TrueType, TrueType GX, PostScript Type 1 and Multiple Master fonts for clients such as Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft.

Tom joined Monotype Typography in July of 1994. It was in January of 2000 that Monotype Typography and Agfa Typographic Systems merged to created Agfa Monotype, which is now the recognized leader in font and font technologies. Tom specializes in TrueType hinting and custom font development. He has developed custom fonts for companies such as Lotus, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft and Lexmark. Among Tom's more visible work with Agfa Monotype has been the TrueType production and hinting of Matthew Carter's Georgia, Verdana, Tahoma and Nina typeface families, commissioned by Microsoft.

Co-Author:

Joshua Hadley has been with Agfa Monotype Corporation since 1993, upon graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, New York, USA). He currently serves as a liaison between sales and production departments, working with type engineers and sales personnel to develop fonts to suit a variety of customer needs. This provides him a unique opportunity to work on lots of interesting jobs, many of which involve complex, multi-script fonts. He lives in San Jose, California, with wife Paula, daughter Erica, and dog Nikko.