Thomas Phinney discusses and shows evidence from several of the cases he has been called into as a typographic consultant, including a forged will, a frontier mailbag, a fake rabbi, and the fake documents about President Bush’s National Guard service. Attendees will learn how mistakes in typography, printing and font selection ruined what could have otherwise been perfectly good forgeries.

About Thomas Phinney
Thomas Phinney is a consulting font guru, type designer, and vice president of FontLab, the font tools company. He teaches type design with the Crafting Type collective, including a workshop in Chicago, Jan 30 – Feb 1.

He is also treasurer of ATypI, the international typographic association. From 1997- 2008 he did type at Adobe, lastly as product manager for fonts and global typography. His typeface Hypatia Sans is an Adobe Original (with help from Robert Slimbach, Miguel Sousa and Paul Hunt). Phinney has spoken at scores of conferences, including ATypI, AIGA, TypeCon, WebVisions, the InDesign Conference, AdobeMAX, and many others. He has long been involved in the design, technical, forensic, business, standards and history of type. His interest in forensic typography has led to testifying as an expert witness in court, being quoted in newspapers from the Washington Post to the Dallas Morning News, and being consulted by organizations ranging from PBS (for History Detectives) to the US Treasury Department. Phinney has an MS in printing from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and an MBA from UC Berkeley.