Tobias Frere-Jones is an American type designer who works in New York City.
Background
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 Limited, 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 Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath.
Education
Frere-Jones teaches typeface design at the Yale School of Art Master of Fine Arts program, with type designer Matthew Carter. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1992 from Rhode Island School of Design, Frere-Jones joined Font Bureau, Incorporated. in Boston.
Career
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.
While working together, the two collaborated on projects for The Wall Street Journal, Martha Stewart Living, Nike, Pentagram, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, 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, Idaho, Page, Print, Eye, and Graphis Incorporated., and is included in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Tobias Frere-Jones’ typefaces include:
In January of 2014, Frere-Jones filed a $20 million lawsuit against Jonathan Hoefler.
The lawsuit was filed after a disagreement over terms of the H&FJ ownership structure. When talks about completing this supposed proposal fell through in 2013, Frere-Jones left H&FJ. Court documents say that Tobias Frere-Jones technically sold Whitney, among others, to Hoefler Type Foundry for $10 when he co-founded H&FJ.