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« Career Change!

In early June, I will be leaving FontLab! My Font Detective work continues to grow beyond what works with a full-​time day job. I am also looking for other gigs that are compatible with said investigations!

I am pleased with many things FontLab has accomplished for its customers in my time there, and have written about what we have done over on the FontLab blog. It has been a fun ride, and I wish my colleagues nothing but the best! But the time has come to move on and do other things.

What was once just occasional expert witness and related work has kept growing, and become quite frequent since I launched my “Font Detective” expert witness web site, a year ago—and even more so in recent months due to publicity around a particularly high-​profile case in Canada (see the Toronto Star and National Post articles).

But I can’t keep up with this, while also being full-​time CEO of FontLab. Yet the pay relative to time is excellent for the detective gig, it is quite fun, and I can imagine doing it part-​time into retirement 20 years from now… so rather than restricting it to a sideline, I am now doubling down on it.

This is a bit tricky, seeing as the detective work is incompatible with being full-​time CEO, yet also not quite at the volume/​reliability to fully replace that full-​time work. Hence, I am looking for other part-​time or temp gigs that are compatible with my “consulting font detective” work:

Talking about font detective cases at Typo San Francisco, 2012.
© 2012 Amber Gregory, FontShop, CC-​BY.
Contact Ms Gregory.

4 commentsto “Career Change!”

  • April 25, 2019
    Patrick Griffin wrote

    Best of luck with the new gig, Tom. You’ve been most excellent with/​for Fontlab, and it’s a bit sad to see you leave there. But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do — Ace Phintura, Font Detective.

  • April 25, 2019
    Lucas Czarnecki wrote

    Congratulations on the change and best of luck! I’m sure you’ll solve all kinds of typographic mysteries of the years to come.

  • April 28, 2019
    Stephen wrote

    Congrats on making your own thing a full-​time thing! BTW, your link to the Fontlab blog post is broken. Should be https://blog.fontlab.com/varia/thomas-phinney-leaves-fontlab/

  • June 23, 2019
    Thomas Phinney wrote

    Thanks! (It was a side effect of drafting posts on different blogs at the same time that each referred to each other. Tricky to be sure you get the links right.)

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