Tobias Frere-Jones was born on August 28th, 1970, in New York, and is still living and working today. He grew up in New York and fell in love with the Manhattan galleries and near the dockyards of Brooklyn. He is a prolific type designer that works with his partner, Jonathan Hoefler at Hoefler & Frere-Jones, which is a type foundry in lower Manhattan in New York. Jonathan Hoefler has been found to be a great partner for Frere- Jones. They work well bouncing ideas off each other and making very successful fonts that many business need and use. This talent comes natural to both of them. Frere- Jones also works with Matthew Carter, whom he met at Rhode Island School of Design, when he grab his attention from being one of the more outstanding students, a type designer too, as teachers at the Yale School of Art MFA program.
He received a BFA in 1992 from Rhode Island School of Design after attending for four years, and then went on to join Font Bureau, Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts. At Rhode Island School of Design he designed the font, Garage Gothic (1992). He based it off the idea of making a set of letters to match the numerals that are commonly found on the stamped tickets at parking garages, hence the name Garage Gothic. This font is a great example of the postmodern adoption of the vernacular. He spent seven of those years as a Senior Designer, during which he created a considerable number of typefaces that are Font Bureau's best known. A couple of them are Gothic & Poynter Oldstyle. He learned his craft at the Font Bureau under the experienced and watchful David Berlow, where he contributed quite a lot to there library. This is where he made the sans-serif Interstate family, based on US highway signage, and was one of the most successful types of the 1990s.
At the young age of fourteen he began making paintings, sculpture and taking photographs that were shown in New York galleries, which has much to do with the fact that he lived in such a place that inspired him to do such things as this, and be so in touch with his natural artistic side, but later he of course found his true calling. He was raised by both writers and printers which could be one big reason why he decided to do typography as his profession but do it is a an artistic way that he knew the best way how. He was lucky to have parents that were so okay with that fact that he was artistic, and that he wanted to make a living doing artistic things. Most parents are not supportive of children wanting a career of something artistic, but since they themselves were in tuned with their artistic side, they had no hesitation supporting their son. The first school he attended was the Rhode Island School of Design, where he received a Graphic design degree in 1992, yet he found this to be not his true passion after a few more years in the real world. Then in 1996, he joined the Yale School of Art faculty as a Critic. In 1999, he then left Font Bureau to go return to New York, which is where he began in partnership with Jonathan Hoefler at Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Frere-Jones has been working with his partner Hoefler at Hoefler & Frere-Jones for almost several years now, and this is his final place to work. They publish Catalogs of their new typefaces and The H&FJ Catalog is now on its ninth edition. Now having been working together for years, they have come together to collaborate 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, experimental reasons, and even custom clients. Some of the clients he has had includes The Boston Globe, The New York Times, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, the Whitney Museum, The American Institure of Graphic Arts Journal, and Neville Brody. Frere-Jones 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 also been featured in multiple publications including How, ID, Page, Print, Eye Magazine, and Graphis. He is included in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In 2006, he received the Gerrit Noordzji Prize, which is an award that is given by the Royal Academy of Art (The Hague) to honor innovations in type design.
He is too young to be involved in a movement, but he sure has made and is still making an impact today on the world with his typefaces. When asked if the world really needs any more typefaces, he replied, "The day we stop needing new type with be the same day that we stop needing new stories and new songs." He really aims for the widest possible range in his work, and he is comfortable with both traditional as well as with strange display faces. He says he has been inspired from very unique everyday things, such as the music of Schoenberg, or even by a row of shopping carts at a store. This shows his true artsiness.
Tobias Frere-Jones describes in his article of his collection, Expriments in Type Design, talks about, "The design of my own typefaces is often punctuated by questions. For the last six years or so, any free time has been spent delving into various questions regarding type design--how these forms behave on a page, how we pull meaning from text, the limits of legibility, the role of context, and so on. These are more trains of thought than typefaces, and I will present them as I worked on them. None of these are really finished: there are no conclusions here, only a progress report of what I've found. For this collection, I have selected a few of the more complete efforts. This is not meant as a definitive statement of a typographic philosophy, not is there necessarily any link from one design to the next. Each font is a catalyst, not necessarily an end product. A font is made, and the process continues, perhaps to another font later on." This lets us see a little bit into Tobias' head about how he feels about his fonts, and the process of making them.
Tobias Frere-Jones is for sure best known for being the designer of the typeface, Interstate, which happens to be a neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface with Industrial roots. It was licensed by the Font Bureau. It was created in the year 1993 and 1994. It is very basic, and not fancy. It has squared edges that are not rounded, and no serifs. It has a thick weight, that is consistent throughout. It is not slanted, just very simple. There is also really wide spacing. The interstate typeface is closely related to the FHWA Series fonts, a signage alphabet that was drawn for the United States Federal Highway Administration in 1949.
Interstate being created 1993 was the same year that President Clinton ordered a Tomahawk cruise missile strike on Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) headquarters in Baghdad in retaliation for an Iraqi plot to assassinate former U.S. president George Bush during his visit to Kuwait in April 1993. Two Navy ships launched a total of 23 missiles against the IIS.
The interstate font was made specially for signage, yet it also has refinements that make it okay to use for text setting in print and on-screen. It actually gained a lot of its popularity in the 1990s after being created, because of its extra uses as for in print and on-screen. Because of the wide spacing it is actually best used for display usage in print, but then Frere-Jones designed another signage typeface, Whitney, that was published by Tobias' company Hoefler & Frere-Jones, which is said to have a resemblance to its ancestor, Interstate, yet it is much less flamboyant and at the same time is more economical for general print usage, for either body copy or headlines.
The ends of each of the ascending and of the descending strokes are all cut at an angle to the stroke such as for lowercase characters, t or l, and on curved strokes like the lowercase characters, e and s, terminals are drawn at a 90 degree angle to the stroke, but positioning them to an angle to the baseline. Another characteristic is that the counters in this typeface are open, even in the bold and bold condensed weights, which is a characteristic that further helps it to be legible.
Interstate is actually used by a good number of large organizations in their logotype and branding materials. Some of the more notable organizations that use Interstate in their logotypes include Sainsbury's Supermarkets, recent signage for Southwest Airlines, Invesco Perpetual, UK rail company c2c, and Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College and Congnizant Technology Solutions.
Ernst & Young, which is one of the largest professional services firms in the world, in May 2008 adopted the use of Interstate in marketing materials and reports as part of a new global visual identity. Interstate was also used as a primary typeface for all ad material for the US Army launched its Army Strong ad campaign in November 2006.
- Armada, 1987–94
- Dolores, 1990
- Hightower, 1990–94
- Nobel, 1991–93
- Garage Gothic, 1992
- Archipelago, 1992–98
- Cafeteria, 1993
- Epitaph, 1993
- Reactor, 1993–96
- Reiner Script, 1993
- Stereo, 1993
- Interstate, 1993–99
- Fibonacci, 1994
- Niagara, 1994
| - Asphalt, 1995
- MSL Gothic (Benton Sans), 1995
- Citadel, 1995
- Microphone, 1995
- Pilsner, 1995
- Poynter Oldstyle, 1996–97
- Poynter Gothic, 1997
- Griffith Gothic, 1997
- Whitney, 1996-2004
- Numbers (with Jonathan Hoefler), 1997–2006
- Phemister, 1997
- Grand Central, 1998
- Welo Script, 1998
- Mercury Text (with Jonathan Hoefler), 1999
| - Vitesse (with Jonathan Hoefler), 2000
- Lever Sans (with Jonathan Hoefler), 2000
- Evolution (with Jonathan Hoefler), 2000
- Retina, 2000
- Nitro, 2001
- Surveyor, 2001
- Archer (with Jonathan Hoefler and Jesse Ragan), 2001
- Gotham, 2001
- Idlewild, 2002
- Exchange, 2002
- Monarch, 2003
- Dulcet, 2003
- Tungsten, 2004
- Argosy, 2004
|
http://www.typography.com/images/about/tobias_frere-jones.png http://www.typography.com/about/biographies.php#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.
http://www.typography.com/collections/index.php?collectionID=700001
http://www.fontbureau.com/people/TobiasFrere-Jones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_(typeface)
Graphic Design: A New History
By Stephen Eskilson
Published by Yale University Press, 2007
An A-Z of Type Designers
By Neil Macmillan
Published by Yale University Press, 2006
Texts on Type: Critical Writings on Typography
By Steven Heller, Philip B. Meggs
Contributor Steven Heller, Philip B. Meggs
Published by Allworth Communications, Inc., 2001
http://perspicuity.net/cgi/disp_day.cgi?6&27&
