Ah, the holiday season — the time of the year when I invariable get a minute or two to catch my breath and reflect upon how exhausted I seem to be by the end of each year. It doesn’t take any deep reflection to know why: I do too much, and too much of it at once, because I constantly chase too many parallel interest and side hustles, and I exist in a state of almost perpetual over-commitment. I’m interested in too many things! Since I am lucky that I can earn a living by doing things that I enjoy anyway, work tends to bleed into non-work, and hobbies overlap with my profession.
An Instagram story prompt had me thinking today about how much I have actually done for work and work-adjacent activities over time. It’s…a lot. (And I say this while feeling a huge amount of shame over letting yet another work-adjacent project blow its last deadline because I haven’t had the time to properly concentrate on it.)
Twenty years ago (!), I published a post about my real résumé — all the jobs I’ve had, not just what I would list on a CV — and that was already a lot. So, let’s see what I’ve been up to since April 2004…
(Again, read here for Part 1)
- Publishing technologies analyst, ASME (1997 until 2008 or so). The end date of this is a little fuzzy, since I know I finished the last stretch or my off-and-on career as a typesetter and developer at ASME before I left for grad school in 2006, but I think I may have done some freelance documentation writing afterward? It’s hard to account for freelance work in a list like this, since those small side projects have filled the cracks between jobs for most of my professional life.
- Graphic designer, Thirteen/WNET (1996–2006). I bopped back and forth between ASME and Thirteen for years after I moved from Boston back to New York City, so these two jobs really define a decade or so of my life from my mid-twenties to the my mid-thirties, when I fled the country to go to grad school. ASME was the more lucrative job, since I was paid for highly specialized technical skills, but Thirteen was by far the more creatively fulfilling. Of course, as full-time freelancer for a non-profit organization, it barely paid my bills, and I had to keep trading off its fulfillment for the more practical roles elsewhere. My last stint ended in 2006, as I wrapped up my affairs and got ready for Reading.
- Adjunct instructor, City College of New York (2004–2006). I taught typography and graphic design at City College for a few years, which was fun but not lucrative. As might guess by looking at the dates, this was a side gig that sat alongside my last couple of years bouncing back and forth between ASME and Thirteen, which should give a sense of how busy I was most of the time.
- Researcher/typeface designer (2008–2010). After a dangerously impoverished year of looking for stuff after grad school (juuuust enough freelance design work to get me through it, I was hired for a 2-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership scheme, where I was employed by the University where I’d studied, and embedded at Monotype to look into what they had done with Indic type over the years.
- Visiting instructor, ArtEZ University of the Arts (2008–2012). This was fun, but it was one of my many digressions. I taught “Branding for Artists” within a master’s course in choreography, based on things I’d picked up doing assorted freelance design work in the arts over the years. A few times a year, I would travel to the Netherlands for a few days and run workshops with a small group of students, teaching them how to talk about and present their choreographic work in different formats, in a way that also helped the articulate for themselves what their work was all about.
- Zine publisher, Pink Mince (2009– ).
- Senior type designer, Monotype (2011–2012). I was hired outright by Monotype when my KTP project ended, but then they messed up my visa paperwork, I had to flee back to the US for six months (more freelance work!), and then six months later I started. The plan was I would continue to learn the ropes for a while as I shadowed Robin Nicholas, who was planning to retire. Once he did, I was promoted (and I think this may have been the only time I have had an actual promotion at any job) to…
- UK Type Director, Monotype (2012–2015). To be fair, there were also a couple of promotions in here, since I eventually transferred from London back to New York, and technically became the Type Director for the UK and the new-at-the-the-time NY office.
- Member, Board of Directors, Type Directors Club (2013–2017). Man, I love so many of the people involved with the TDC, but so much of my involvement felt like we were just trying to justify why people should keep paying enough to keep the lights on. I had a mini-stroke in the middle of a board meeting at one point, and although it certainly wasn’t caused by my feeling about the whole thing, it felt like a sign that I should devote my energies elsewhere.
- Instructor, School of Visual Arts (2014–2021). For a week out of each summer for a number of years, I taught part of a four-week type design class in SVA’s summer program, whose course name tended to shift from year to year as we tweaked the format of the program. That online-only Covid summer in 2020 was a rough one, let me tell you.
- Senior Manager for Type Development, Adobe (2016–2021). This was a really plum gig, and because I had to wait out a non-compete clause in my Monotype contract, I waited a full year (filled with more freelance design work) to start — the week after variable fonts were announced. So, that became a big part of my job for the next few years. It also kinda burned me out at a certain point, for a number of concurrent reasons I don’t feel like getting into.
- Member, Board of Directors, Society of Publication Designers (2018–2019). I joined the board as favor to a friend who was finishing her term, and it was a bad idea. Much like with my experience at the TDC, I had trouble getting past the idea that the organization could barely articulate what its value might be to members.
- Secretary, Board of Directors, Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum (2020– ). I feel a lot better about this one, although I feel so personally invested in the museum’s success and its future that it is perhaps more work than I can sustain for much longer.
- Proprietor, Bijou Type (2021– ). Truly, I feel like this is My Work. All the other paying gigs at this point are just a way to survive so I can keep publishing my own typefaces once in a while.
- Director of Type Products, Type Network (2021–2023). When I was bluntly informed that I couldn’t get a mortgage without a full-time job, a wonderful opportunity appeared to work with a great group of people I had known in one way or another for many years. Wonderful people, fun job, but they had a cash crunch a had to let me go.
- Director of Foundry Relations, The Type Founders (2023–2024). A lifeline that appeared right after Type Network, and another fun job with another great group of people. Financially unsustainable, sadly.
- Director of Inventory Strategy and Curation, Monotype (2024– ). Fun so far! It’s nice to be back — nicer than I would have ever expected.