Who Is Frere-Jones?

Tobias Frere-Jones is an American type designer based in New York City. He was born in 1970 to a family who had a rich history with typography. His parents worked as copywriters and print buyers, so he was always surrounded with various letterforms. Although he was enthusiastic about fine arts and photography during his early teenage years, his daily interactions with written text helped him understand the power of type and influenced him to enter Rhode Island School of Design. After receiving his BFA in 1992, Matthew Carter directed him towards Font Bureau in Boston. Frere-Jones spent the seven years at the Bureau as a Senior Designer creating the agencies most eminent typefaces; Interstate, Poynter Oldstyle and Gothic, and Benton Modern and Sans.

The ‘Interstate’ family was first introduced in 1993. I was inspired by the United States Federal Highway …show more content…
This would have been a huge leap for the foundry as the web design market was growing rapidly, and with it, the demand for readily available web fonts. Frere-Jones pulled 15 type families for this project, and began inspecting each and every character in varying sizes. This would then sum up to 120 different fonts, which were precisely formed to work across all web browsers and operating systems. However, the project was postponed repeatedly allowing other companies to take advantage of the situation and launch their own web font services; such as Google Fonts. Cloud.typography finally released three years later, in July 2013. During the several years it took to develop the cloud, Frere-Jones asked for his name to be formally written down as a partner of the foundry. Hoefler kept avoiding these requests until October 2013, when he completely rejected the idea of Frere-Jones ever being an equal partner of H&FJ. Due to the dispute between the two, Frere-Jones was left with no choice but to leave the foundry in January