Tobias Frere-Jones

Tobias Frere-Jones (born Tobias Edgar Mallory Jones, August 28, 1970) is an American type designer who works in New York City. He operates the company Frere-Jones Type and teaches typeface design at the Yale School of Art MFA program.

Among his typefaces are Gotham which was used by the Obama 2008 presidential campaign,

Career Frere-Jones grew up in Brooklyn and became interested in letter design while attending Saint Ann's School. He is a son of Robin Carpenter Jones, who wrote for advertising agencies, and his British wife, the former Elizabeth Frere, daughter of Alexander Stuart Frere. His brother is music critic Sasha Frere-Jones and his great-grandfather was writer Edgar Wallace. He created a number of the typefaces that are Font Bureau's best known, among them Interstate. He joined the Yale School of Art faculty in 1996, and teaches type design there alongside Matthew Carter and Nina Stössinger.

In 1999, he left Font Bureau to return to New York, where he began working with the company of Jonathan Hoefler, renamed Hoefler & Frere-Jones in 2005. While working together, the two collaborated on projects for The Wall Street Journal, Martha Stewart Living, Nike, Pentagram, GQ, Esquire, The New Times, Business 2.0, and The New York Times Magazine. In 2014 Frere-Jones ended his work with Hoefler and filed a lawsuit against him which was resolved in an out-of-court settlement later that year. He then established his own company, Frere-Jones Type, which released its first retail family, Mallory, in 2015.

In 2006, Frere-Jones received the Gerrit Noordzij Prize, an award given by the Royal Academy of Art (The Hague) to honor innovations in type design. In 2013 he received the AIGA Medal and won the National Design Award for Communication Design from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in 2019.

Frere-Jones married Christine Annabelle Bateup in 2006.

Typeface design Frere-Jones' typeface Gotham became well known for use by the Obama 2008 presidential campaign. Several of Frere-Jones' best-known typefaces were designed for Martha Stewart Living. Several of Frere-Jones' designs in the 1990s, notably Reactor, were highly expressive in the "grunge typography" style of the period; some were created for Neville Brody. However, he commented in a 1994 article that "grunge has firmly dated itself and many are already tired of it." A 2012 review by Christopher Hamamoto described Frere-Jones' later work as generally based on "formality and practicality", and a Businessweek article commented that Frere-Jones' later type design generally preferred "a cleaner style based on historic typefaces".

In a podcast interview, Frere-Jones described his order of work:I think of a typeface's design as being less about the specific letters. It doesn't begin with thinking that the bowl on the lower-case 'g' ought to look like this, or the tail on the 'q' ought to do this…it's more about the theme that runs through all these shapes, the kind of strategy that helps them work with one another…I think secondly, for a typeface designer the alphabet is not a linear sequence…it's a bunch of, almost like little tribes of, like-minded things...the first three letters that we often draw are the capital 'H', as a representative from the camp of square things, the capital 'O', as obviously something round, and then the capital 'D', as something that's a kind of hybrid form. And just in those three letters there are all kinds of decisions to make about how heavy things are, how much contrast they have and the difference between heavy and light within a single shape, how wide they are. If there are serifs in there, what kind of shape and length that they have, and also how much space is allotted to each side of these shapes. Because that's a really critical part of making a typeface work, is not just drawing the shapes but drawing and designing the space in between the shapes, and also inside them.So it's not uncommon to spend the whole day or several days on just these first three letters and to come back to these first three letters and try something differently and see what the implications are. That would often be followed by a corresponding trio of letters in the lower-case…'n', 'o' and 'p', the same idea of something square, something round, something mixed. And after those three get coordinated with each other, it's then time to get the caps to work in some consistent way with the lower-case…and then from there I build out the character sets on the lines of these initial camps of square and round and diagonal…I try to get onscreen as soon as possible because so much of the strategy and so much of the success of the design is in how successfully these shapes can combine with one another, and if they're digital I can rearrange these shapes in any order.

Many of Frere-Jones' typefaces are extremely large families designed for professional users, for instance Mallory which as of 2019 had 110 styles. Organisations that commissioned work from Frere-Jones have included GQ magazine, the Whitney Museum, Martha Stewart Living and the Essex Market. In 2014 German type designer Erik Spiekermann, who published Frere-Jones' first typeface, described him as "one of the two or three best type designers in the world".

Typefaces

Tobias Frere-Jones' typefaces include:

Armada, 1987–94 Dolores, 1990 Hightower Text Nobel, 1991–93 Garage Gothic, 1992 Cassandra, 1992 Pythagoras, 1992 Proxy, 1992 Zoetrope, 1992 Horizon, 1992 Archipelago, 1992–98 Vitriol, 1992–94 Cafeteria, 1993 Epitaph, 1993 Nixie, 1993 Reiner Script, 1993 Stereo, 1993 Chainletter, 1993–94 Reactor, 1993–96 Interstate, 1993–99 Fibonacci, 1994 Sum Of The Parts, 1994 Rietveld, 1994 Supermodel, 1994 Niagara, 1994 Asphalt, 1995 Benton Gothic, 1995 Citadel, 1995 Microphone, 1995 Pilsner, 1995 Poynter Oldstyle, 1996–97 Poynter Gothic, 1997 Griffith Gothic, 1997–2000 Whitney, 1996–2004 Benton Modern (with David Berlow), 1997–2015 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 Landmark (with Jonathan Hoefler), 2000–12 Evolution (with Jonathan Hoefler), 2000 Retina, 2000–16 Nitro, 2001 Surveyor, 2001 Archer (with Jonathan Hoefler), 2001 Gotham, 2000–09 Idlewild, 2002–12 Exchange, 2002–17 Monarch, 2003 Dulcet, 2003 Tungsten, 2004–12 Argosy, 2004 Gotham Rounded, 2005 Mallory, 2015 Conductor (designed with Nina Stössinger), 2018 Empirica (designed with Nina Stössinger), 1994–2018 Seaford, 2019–21 (designed with Nina Stössinger and Fred Shallcrass) Community Gothic (designed with Fred Shallcrass and Nina Stössinger), 1997–2022 Supermassive (designed with Fred Shallcrass, Nina Stössinger, and Rosie Mai), 2019–2024 Edgar (designed with Nina Stössinger, Hrvoje Živčić, and Fred Shallcrass), 2014–2025