Tom Rickner. Creative Type Director.

Tom Rickner is a Creative Type Director with a career in type that spans more than three decades. During that time, he has mastered nearly every aspect of type design and font production, from his earliest days editing bitmaps, to designing some of the very first Multiple Master fonts for Adobe and TrueType GX Variations fonts for the Font Bureau and Apple.

Although he is likely most well-known for his hinting of Matthew Carter’s Georgia, Verdana, Tahoma and Nina typefaces for Microsoft, Tom’s expertise and passion is found at the intersection of design, tools and technology related to fonts, including variable font technology.

Tom has led or collaborated on the designs of fonts that include Arial, Bodoni, Broadway, Gallia, Goudy Forum Pro, Helvetica Now and Rebekah Pro, among others.

Tom leads the remarkable team of award-winning type designers that make up the Monotype Studio, as well as the many custom fonts designed for corporations and brands around the globe. He is a graduate of the School of Printing Management and Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Studio releases.

Helvetica Now

Everyone. Everywhere. Everything.

Helvetica® Now is a new chapter in the story of perhaps the best-known typeface of all time. Available in three optical sizes—Micro, Text, and Display—every character in Helvetica Now has been redrawn and refit; with a variety of useful alternates added.

Type specimen Contact sales

Goudy Forum Pro™

A revival and dramatic expansion.

The Goudy Forum font began more than 30 years ago while Tom Rickner was a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Tom printed a type specimen using the Forum Title foundry hot metal types. Then in 1993 Tom began to digitize the font from that specimen while working as an independent type designer. Fifteen years passed before Tom dusted off the digital data and began working in earnest on font with a full Latin 1 character set. Steve Matteson, type director at Ascender, encouraged Tom to take this font further still, and soon the glyph repertoire and feature set blossomed to a robust Pro font with a myriad of advanced typographic OpenType features.

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Rebekah Pro™

Elegance and distinction.

Rebekah Pro is a revival of ATF’s Piranesi family, the regular being designed by Willard Sniffin, and the remaining weights designed by Morris Fuller Benton. Tom Rickner first revived Benton’s Italic for use in his wedding invitations for his marriage to Rebekah Zapf in 2006. He completed the character set in 2009.

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Thought leadership.

TYPO Brand Talk Panel.

Inside the Monotype studio.

From around the web.

TYPO Labs 2017

Is variable the new font format?

Tom Rickner and John Hudson jointly answering the current questions on trending font formats, current font technology and their lonely island fonts.

TYPO Talk

TrueType Variations: Past, Present & Future

This talk will discuss lessons learned, current capabilities and limitations of Variations, and will conclude with a vision for what the future of this exciting technology could bring.