Thomas Rickner

Who is Thomas Rickner?

Thomas Rickner is an American type designer who, while Lead Typographer at Apple Inc., supervised the production of the first TrueType fonts released in 1991 as part of Apple’s System 7 operating system for the Macintosh. Rickner provided TrueType production and font hinting of Matthew Carter’s Georgia, Verdana, and Tahoma typeface families, commissioned by Microsoft and widely distributed in the Windows operating system and Apple’s Mac OS X. Rickner’s original type designs include Amanda, Buffalo Gal and Hamilton.

Rickner began his career in type design in 1987 as a bitmap editor for Omnipage Corporation, 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, Rickner worked in the production and hand font hinting for laser printers.

In 1989, Rickner began working for Apple, Inc., where he served as Lead Typographer for two years.