Tobias Frere-Jones
Encyclopedia
Tobias Frere-Jones is a prolific type designer who works in New York City with fellow type designer Jonathan Hoefler
at Hoefler & Frere-Jones
, a type foundry
in lower Manhattan. Frere-Jones teaches typeface design at the Yale School of Art
MFA program, with type designer Matthew Carter
.
He is a son of Robin Carpenter Jones and his wife, the former Elizabeth Frere, and a brother of music critic Sasha Frere-Jones
. He is a grandson of Alexander Stuart Frere-Reeves, the former chairman of the board of William Heinemann Ltd, the British publishing house, a great-grandson of the writer Edgar Wallace, who wrote the screenplay for the film King Kong
, and a nephew of Vice Admiral Sir Richard Tobias Frere KCB.
After receiving a BFA in 1992 from Rhode Island School of Design
, Frere-Jones joined Font Bureau, Inc. in Boston. Over seven years as a Senior Designer, he created a number of the typefaces that are Font Bureau's best known, among them Interstate and Poynter Oldstyle & Gothic. He joined the Yale School of Art faculty in 1996 as a Critic. In 1999, he left Font Bureau to return to New York, where he began work with Jonathan Hoefler. Since working together, the two have collaborated on projects for The Wall Street Journal
, Martha Stewart Living
, Nike
, Pentagram
, GQ, Esquire magazine, The New Times, Business 2.0
, and The New York Times Magazine
.
He has designed over seven hundred typefaces for retail publication, custom clients, and experimental purposes. His clients have included The Boston Globe
, The New York Times
, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
, the Whitney Museum, The American Institute of Graphic Arts Journal, and Neville Brody
. He has lectured at Rhode Island School of Design
, Yale School of Art
, Pratt Institute
, Royal College of Art
, and Universidad de las Americas
. His work has been featured in HOW, ID
, Page, Print
, Eye
, and Graphis Inc., and is included in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In 2006, Frere-Jones received the prestigious Gerrit Noordzij Prize
, an award given by The Royal Academy of Art
(The Hague) to honor innovations in type design.
He married Christine Annabelle Bateup in 2006.
Jonathan Hoefler
Jonathan Hoefler is an American typeface designer. Hoefler founded Hoefler & Frere-Jones , a type foundry in New York that Hoefler shares with fellow type designer Tobias Frere-Jones.Hoefler has designed original typefaces for Rolling Stone Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine,...
at Hoefler & Frere-Jones
Hoefler & Frere-Jones
Hoefler & Frere-Jones is an influential type foundry in New York City, run by designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. With both their similarities and their likings it was only a matter of time that both their paths would come across and would have became business partners. Both Hoefler...
, a type foundry
Type foundry
A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Originally, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Monotype machines designed to be printed on letterpress printers...
in lower Manhattan. Frere-Jones teaches typeface design at the Yale School of Art
Yale School of Art
The Yale School of Art is one of twelve constituent schools of Yale University. It is a professional art school, granting only Masters of Fine Arts degrees to those completing studies in graphic design, painting/printmaking, photography, or sculpture....
MFA program, with type designer Matthew Carter
Matthew Carter
Matthew Carter is a type designer. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Carter's career in type design has witnessed the transition from physical metal type to digital type...
.
He is a son of Robin Carpenter Jones and his wife, the former Elizabeth Frere, and a brother of music critic Sasha Frere-Jones
Sasha Frere-Jones
Sasha Frere-Jones is an American writer, music critic, and musician. He has written for Pretty Decorating, ego trip, Hit It And Quit It, Mean, Slant, The New York Post, The Wire, The Village Voice, Slate, Spin, and The New York Times...
. He is a grandson of Alexander Stuart Frere-Reeves, the former chairman of the board of William Heinemann Ltd, the British publishing house, a great-grandson of the writer Edgar Wallace, who wrote the screenplay for the film King Kong
King Kong
King Kong is a fictional character, a giant movie monster resembling a gorilla, that has appeared in several movies since 1933. These include the groundbreaking 1933 movie, the film remakes of 1976 and 2005, as well as various sequels of the first two films...
, and a nephew of Vice Admiral Sir Richard Tobias Frere KCB.
Toby Frere
Vice Admiral Sir Richard Tobias Frere KCB is a former Royal Navy officer who ended his career as Chief of Fleet Support.-Naval career:...
After receiving a BFA in 1992 from Rhode Island School of Design
Rhode Island School of Design
Rhode Island School of Design is a fine arts and design college located in Providence, Rhode Island. It was founded in 1877. Located at the base of College Hill, the RISD campus is contiguous with the Brown University campus. The two institutions share social, academic, and community resources and...
, Frere-Jones joined Font Bureau, Inc. in Boston. Over seven years as a Senior Designer, he created a number of the typefaces that are Font Bureau's best known, among them Interstate and Poynter Oldstyle & Gothic. He joined the Yale School of Art faculty in 1996 as a Critic. In 1999, he left Font Bureau to return to New York, where he began work with Jonathan Hoefler. Since working together, the two have collaborated on projects for The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
, Martha Stewart Living
Martha Stewart Living
Martha Stewart Living is a magazine and a television show featuring entertaining and home decorating guru Martha Stewart. Both the magazine and the television program focus on the domestic arts. Martha Stewart Living began as a quarterly magazine in 1990, published by Time Inc..and is currently...
, Nike
Nike, Inc.
Nike, Inc. is a major publicly traded sportswear and equipment supplier based in the United States. The company is headquartered near Beaverton, Oregon, which is part of the Portland metropolitan area...
, Pentagram
Pentagram (design studio)
Pentagram is a design studio that was founded in 1972 by Alan Fletcher, Theo Crosby, Colin Forbes, Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky in Needham Road, West London, UK...
, GQ, Esquire magazine, The New Times, Business 2.0
Business 2.0
Business 2.0 was a monthly magazine publication founded by magazine entrepreneur Chris Anderson, Mark Gross, and journalist James Daly in order to chronicle the rise of the "New Economy"...
, and The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors...
.
He has designed over seven hundred typefaces for retail publication, custom clients, and experimental purposes. His clients have included The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993...
, The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Cooper–Hewitt, National Design Museum, a subsidiary of the Smithsonian Institution, is the United States' national museum of design history and contemporary design and the only museum in the U.S. whose collection is solely focused on contemporary and historic design...
, the Whitney Museum, The American Institute of Graphic Arts Journal, and Neville Brody
Neville Brody
Neville Brody is an English graphic designer, typographer and art director.Neville Brody is an alumnus of the London College of Printing and Hornsey College of Art, and is known for his work on The Face magazine and Arena magazine , as well as for designing record covers for artists such as...
. He has lectured at Rhode Island School of Design
Rhode Island School of Design
Rhode Island School of Design is a fine arts and design college located in Providence, Rhode Island. It was founded in 1877. Located at the base of College Hill, the RISD campus is contiguous with the Brown University campus. The two institutions share social, academic, and community resources and...
, Yale School of Art
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
, Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute is a private art college in New York City located in Brooklyn, New York, with satellite campuses in Manhattan and Utica. Pratt is one of the leading undergraduate art schools in the United States and offers programs in Architecture, Graphic Design, History of Art and Design,...
, Royal College of Art
Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...
, and Universidad de las Americas
Universidad de las Américas
Universidad de las Américas may refer to:*Fundación Universidad de las Américas, Puebla , university in Cholula, Puebla state, Mexico*Universidad de las Américas, A.C., university in Mexico City, Mexico....
. His work has been featured in HOW, ID
I.D. (magazine)
I.D. was a magazine covering the art, business and culture of design. It was published eight times a year by F+W Media....
, Page, Print
Print (magazine)
The publication, Print, A Quarterly Journal of the Graphic Arts, was a limited edition quarterly periodical begun in 1940 and continued under different names up to the present day as Print, a bimonthly American magazine about visual culture and design.In its current format, Print documents and...
, Eye
Eye (magazine)
Eye Magazine, The International Review of Graphic Design is a quarterly print magazine on graphic design and visual culture.- History :...
, and Graphis Inc., and is included in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In 2006, Frere-Jones received the prestigious Gerrit Noordzij Prize
Gerrit Noordzij Prize
The Gerrit Noordzij Prize is given to type designers and typographers for extraordinary contributions to the fields of type design, typography and type education. The prize is awarded every three years by the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague together with the Museum Meermanno, under the auspices...
, an award given by The Royal Academy of Art
Royal Academy of Art (The Hague)
The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague is an art academy in the Netherlands. It is the oldest art academy in Europe. Known in Dutch as "Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, Den Haag" it was founded on 29 September 1682 when its predecessor, the Haagsche Teekenakademie was dissolved.- External...
(The Hague) to honor innovations in type design.
He married Christine Annabelle Bateup in 2006.
Typefaces
Tobias Frere-Jones' types include:- Armada, 1987–94
- Dolores, 1990
- Hightower, 1990–94
- NobelNobel (typeface)Nobel is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Sjoerd Henrik de Roos and Dick Dooijes in the period 1929–1935 for the Amsterdam Type foundry). Capitalizing upon Lettergieterij Amsterdam's substantial financial interest in the Berlin typefoundry H. Berthold AG, de Roos conceived of a revival...
, 1991–93 - Garage Gothic, 1992
- Archipelago, 1992–98
- Cafeteria, 1993
- Epitaph, 1993
- Reactor, 1993–96
- Reiner Script, 1993
- Stereo, 1993
- InterstateInterstate (typeface)Interstate is a digital typeface designed by Tobias Frere-Jones in the period 1993–1999, and licensed by Font Bureau. The typeface is closely related to the FHWA Series fonts, a signage alphabet drawn for the United States Federal Highway Administration in 1949....
, 1993–99 - Fibonacci, 1994
- Niagara, 1994
- Asphalt, 1995
- MSL Gothic (Benton SansBenton SansBenton Sans is a digital typeface family begun by Tobias Frere-Jones in 1995, and expanded by Cyrus Highsmith of Font Bureau. It was a reworked version of Benton Gothic developed for various corporate customers, under Frere-Jones's guidance. In developing the typeface, Frere-Jones studied drawings...
), 1995 - Citadel, 1995
- Microphone, 1995
- Pilsner, 1995
- Poynter Oldstyle, 1996–97
- Poynter Gothic, 1997
- Griffith Gothic, 1997
- Whitney, 1996-2004
- Numbers (with Jonathan HoeflerJonathan HoeflerJonathan Hoefler is an American typeface designer. Hoefler founded Hoefler & Frere-Jones , a type foundry in New York that Hoefler shares with fellow type designer Tobias Frere-Jones.Hoefler has designed original typefaces for Rolling Stone Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine,...
), 1997–2006 - Phemister, 1997
- Grand Central, 1998
- Welo Script, 1998
- Mercury Text (with Jonathan HoeflerJonathan HoeflerJonathan Hoefler is an American typeface designer. Hoefler founded Hoefler & Frere-Jones , a type foundry in New York that Hoefler shares with fellow type designer Tobias Frere-Jones.Hoefler has designed original typefaces for Rolling Stone Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine,...
), 1999
- Vitesse (with Jonathan HoeflerJonathan HoeflerJonathan Hoefler is an American typeface designer. Hoefler founded Hoefler & Frere-Jones , a type foundry in New York that Hoefler shares with fellow type designer Tobias Frere-Jones.Hoefler has designed original typefaces for Rolling Stone Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine,...
), 2000 - Lever Sans (with Jonathan HoeflerJonathan HoeflerJonathan Hoefler is an American typeface designer. Hoefler founded Hoefler & Frere-Jones , a type foundry in New York that Hoefler shares with fellow type designer Tobias Frere-Jones.Hoefler has designed original typefaces for Rolling Stone Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine,...
), 2000 - Evolution (with Jonathan HoeflerJonathan HoeflerJonathan Hoefler is an American typeface designer. Hoefler founded Hoefler & Frere-Jones , a type foundry in New York that Hoefler shares with fellow type designer Tobias Frere-Jones.Hoefler has designed original typefaces for Rolling Stone Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine,...
), 2000 - Retina, 2000
- Nitro, 2001
- SurveyorSurveyor (typeface)Surveyor is a Didone classification digital serif typeface designed by Tobias Frere-Jones in 2001 as a custom typeface for use in Martha Stewart Living magazine...
, 2001 - ArcherArcher (typeface)Archer is a slab serif style digital typeface designed in 2001 by Hoefler & Frere-Jones for use in Martha Stewart Living magazine. The face is unique for combining the geometric structure of twentieth century European slab-serifs but imbuing the face with a domestic, less strident tone of voice.The...
(with Jonathan HoeflerJonathan HoeflerJonathan Hoefler is an American typeface designer. Hoefler founded Hoefler & Frere-Jones , a type foundry in New York that Hoefler shares with fellow type designer Tobias Frere-Jones.Hoefler has designed original typefaces for Rolling Stone Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine,...
), 2001 - GothamGotham (typeface)Gotham is a family of geometric sans-serif digital typefaces designed by American type designer Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000. Gotham's letterforms are inspired by a form of architectural signage that achieved popularity in the mid-twentieth century, and are especially popular throughout New York...
, 2000 - Idlewild, 2002
- Exchange, 2002
- Monarch, 2003
- Dulcet, 2003
- Tungsten, 2004–2009
- Argosy, 2004
- Gotham Rounded, 2005
Sources
- Hoefler & Frere-Jones
- Frere-Jones biography at Hoefler & Frere-Jones
- Friedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History. Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. ISBN 1-57912-023-7.
- Macmillan, Neil. An A–Z of Type Designers. Yale University Press: 2006. ISBN 0-300-11151-7.