I hate writing about myself…

…but I work for people who know about marketing and they always tell me that I need to tell potential clients about my career. So, on the advice of many of my lovely clients, here goes…

I care very deeply about typographic expression.

I became a designer after realizing that the way the words looked on my favorite poster changed how the poster made me feel about the text. I love that letter shapes can do this.

I make letters that do jobs.

I’m much more concerned with how well my work is doing its assigned duty than I am about what the work looks like.

I am proud of how long my clients use my work.

I’m just as proud of the small projects that clients are still using 10+ years later as I am of of the big projects that get a lot of attention.

I am happiest with my work when no one knows I was there.

It sounds counterintuitve, but I aim to not leave my fingerprints on my work. My goal is to amplify my client’s message, not show off what I can do.

A significant amount of my work is subtle and unseen.

‍My work is often felt more than it is seen.

My design work has had a pretty big cultural impact.

‍I codified the American Sports typographic vernacular into a comprehensive typeface that is so prevalent that it makes my kids angry. I made the Fortnite font which is also one of the Disney fonts and one of the Lego fonts and is also everywhere. Hundreds of clients use my typefaces and lettering on things that you see every day.

My hobby of being grumpy about the poor quality of typography on the web significantly improved typography on the web.

‍I co-invented WOFF, rallied the type design industry around it and wrote the test suite that made the rollout of the format seamless in browsers. I needled the inventor of CSS relentlessly until he understood sophisticated typography and finally moved web typography out of the simplistic 1980s Desktop Publishing era. I inexplicably have an Emmy® for my efforts.

My other hobby of loving the work of my colleagues and wanting them to have a frictionless workflow has had an indirect impact on most typefaces made in the last 20 years.

‍I co-invented the standard font format used in the typeface design process. I have open sourced hundreds of thousands of lines of code to help type designers make better typefaces. I either made the tools, made the foundation of the tools or influenced the capabilities of the tools that most type designers use today.

My work has won some awards but I don’t know which ones.

‍I truly only care about how well the things that I make for my clients do their jobs.

Vince McMahon (allegedly) once said that my work looked like “shit.”

‍I sold fonts to David Lee Roth’s very chill roadie. Lucasfilm angrily threatened to sue me if I showed anyone the font I made for one of their movies. I jokingly told Wayne Rooney that I’m more famous than him because I made the Fortnite font and he tacitly agreed. Phillipe Starck (allegedly) got angry at his own handwriting because of me. I declined party invitations from both Martha Stewart and Rachel Ray. I made the best Klingon font ever but it didn’t get used in the movie so you’ll never be able to see it until “after the end of the known universe.” A celebrity known for selling $400 t-shirts told me that I’m too expensive. My late grandfather, at age 91, explained my job to his friends better than I will ever be able to.