Science Gothic—Design/Production Person Needed »

(UPDATE: Applications are closed. I definitely have enough qualified people to consider! Anyone who expressed interest should have heard from me before 5 pm PST, August 6th, 2019.)

Today I got back a signed contract, commissioning Font Detective LLC to do a new version of the classic American Type Founders’ typeface Bank Gothic (Morris Fuller Benton, 1930–34), for Google Fonts.
UPDATE: We are calling it Science Gothic.

This will be a multi-​axis Variable Font. I have done a fair bit of prototyping, but there is lots of work ahead! And, given the timeline, too much work and not enough time for me to do it solo.

Freelance Type Design — Open Source Bank Gothic, FontLab VI

The new Bank Science Gothic will have an extended Latin and Cyrillic character set (about 1200 glyphs). It has weight, width and contrast axes, plus an oblique axis as well. I am looking for at least one more person (maybe two) to help work on it in FontLab VI; currently it is me and one p/​t person. 

The typeface has 3 x 3 masters for weight/​width, and then double that again for contrast (and again for italics, although that will be basically oblique and largely automated). Luckily the square-​geometric design is well-​suited to this treatment and makes for mostly easier editing.

An initial demo-​ready deadline will be the end of August. Full-​time availability preferred, although the first week or so may be a bit slower. Aiming to have the font final in late November. This will be work for hire, and the resulting typeface will be open source, and licensed under the Open Font License.

More Bank Gothic in use—it’s everywhere! (Avengers Endgame movie title in the film, for instance.) But this is our chance to make it massively more versatile and flexible, and available to everyone.

How to apply: email me directly, or just leave a comment here (I won’t publish it) with your email address. I will send a link to a more detailed job description and more info!

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:

• Font consulting—design, technical, business, and other. Are you a foundry or type designer who needs some one-​on-​one review and lessons to up your type design game? Have a font tech problem that needs solving?
• Type design on my own and/​or for clients
• Teaching, whether training people on FontLab VI, teaching type design, or other gigs. (This could include, but is not limited to, reviving the lately-​dormant Crafting Type workshops.)