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Awesome: Fiona Ross receives 2014 SOTA Typography Award »

I was standing at the side of the room at TypeCon 2014 in DC for the SoTA Typography award, given to one person each year for contributions to the field of type design. Honestly, I was trying to decide whether to bag out early and get some dinner, or wait and hear the speeches. I was sure the award recipient would be somebody deserving, but that leaves a lot of room. Victor Gaultney of SIL, who specialize in fonts for global language support, was standing next to me. We chatted and agreed that we had no idea who was going to get the award this year.

Fiona Ross receiving SoTA Typography award

Fiona Ross receiving SoTA Typography award. Photo © 2014 Laurence Penney, all rights reserved, used with his kind permission.

When the award presentation began, in the first few moments it became apparent to us from the preamble who was getting the award. I couldn’t help myself. “They’re giving it to Fiona!” I burst out, turning to Victor. We looked at each other, did a spontaneous fist bump, and shouted “YES!” in unison, doubtless disturbing the nearby attendees (sorry about that, folks).

I simply couldn’t imagine a more appropriate recipient for the award, and certainly nobody as deserving whose early career was so long unsung in public. Needless to say, I stayed through to the very end of the speeches and ceremony.

While it is not precisely true to say my younger daughter is named after Ms. Ross, neither is her first name being Fiona completely coincidental. Fiona Ross is an amazing person in both her professional achievements and as a human being, so sharing a name with her hardly seemed like a bad thing. Ms Ross has made immense contributions to global type design: in her work heading up Linotype’s non-​Latin type design team; as an educator at the University of Reading for their MA Typeface Design program; and creating and overseeing commissioned type designs at Tiro Typeworks (with John Hudson, Ross Mills and Tim Holloway, among others) for clients such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Harvard University.

Typefaces designed personally by Fiona (such as the Linotype Bengali) or by her team remain among the most widely used typefaces in the relevant parts of the world, their equivalents of Times and Helvetica.

I had the occasion to hire Tiro, and hence Fiona, when Adobe needed Arabic, Hebrew and Thai typefaces. The team did splendid work on all three, as well as developing a quote on a set of Indic typefaces, some of which would eventually be commissioned by Adobe, years later. Fiona was polite and gentle early on when I made a criticism showing my complete and utter ignorance of the norms of Thai type design, about which I can only say… I was young and foolish.

That is another theme in her career: Fiona Ross has also been unfailingly helpful and absurdly humble. She does not like to be called an “expert” on non-​Latin type design, preferring the term “specialist.” But as must undoubtedly be clear by now, if she is not an expert, then there must be no experts, as she is in the top tier of the most knowledgeable people in the world in this area. This willingness to share her knowledge and erudition has magnified her impact on the world and on the field of type design. No better award candidate could be imagined.