An Unbelievable Opportunity to Innovate
Driving Type Toward a Future Vision
Tim Brown, Adobe’s Head of Typography, is shaping the future of design. His team is inventing typographic intelligence technologies and advising Adobe product teams on text-related features and typography tools. “As it happens, I’m doing this during the biggest shift in the history of graphic design.” Because design has become more flexible, it has become more complex. Tim explained, “Because of the web and advancements in personal computing, every reader brings their own unique perspective to a designed experience.” Tools must be developed to support those individual perspectives.
Tim is on a mission to empower new models with revolutionized design tools. In a recent interview, Tim unveiled his ambitious dream project. Tim sees a future where designers control typography, making high-level decisions while seamlessly integrating their design intentions with individually customizable readability settings. [Readers may need or desire larger text, differently shaped letters, more character or line spacing, etc.] Tim explains that “design tools that exist today are, in many ways, stuck in an old paradigm, so here is an unbelievable opportunity ahead to innovate, to provide a new set of basic tools more relevant for the future than anything that exists now.”
Readers everywhere will benefit from Tim and the Adobe Fonts & Type team’s work. Their dual focus on design tools and readers’ actual interactions with text will deliver better reading experiences for individuals within the context intended by publishers.
Read the entire interview on Adobe’s blog.
What’s a dream project you’re currently involved with, or want to take on?
This gets back to the vision I mentioned earlier, thinking big. And continues my answer about what excites me most. Design has changed, and design tools haven’t caught up. My dream project is to allow people to control typography by making high-level decisions, viewing their work from multiple perspectives at once, and blending their design intentions with any given individual’s custom settings for readability. Design tools that exist today are, in many ways, stuck in an old paradigm, so here is an unbelievable opportunity ahead to innovate, to provide a new set of basic tools more relevant for the future than anything that exists now.
Tim Brown, Head of Typography, Adobe
About Tim Brown: Tim is a designer and toolmaker, with a focus on typography, who thinks about product direction, designs software, and helps novices and experts alike hone their typographic skills. He speaks about the evolving craft of typography at conferences worldwide and online. Tim lives and works in New York state’s beautiful Hudson Valley with his wife, and college sweetheart, Eileen, three daughters, and their dogs. Visit Tim’s website.
