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I was born in 1975 in Tychy, a town in the Polish region of Upper Silesia. I currently live in Berlin, the thrilling capital of Germany. I work as a consultant in digital typography. I’m also continuing my studies cultural sciences and business administration. My main work areas are: digital typography, multilingual text processing, type design, typographic software, font development, font technology and various aspects of written language, with particular focus on the Unicode and OpenType technologies, and on the typographic development in Central and Eastern Europe.

Since 2004, I am Product and Marketing Manager at Fontlab Ltd., an international software development company specializing in font technology. At Fontlab Ltd., I develop scripting solutions, am responsible for the company’s product marketing activities and provide technical assistance to FontLab users around the world. Since 2000, I am also typographic consultant to MyFonts, world’s leading online font distributor. In addition, I regularly work as consultant for clients such as Linotype GmbH , Adobe Systems, Corel Corporation, Porchez Typofonderie, Tiro Typeworks, and others. I create typographic software, develop OpenType fonts, and occasionally design print publications and websites.

I regularly write and lecture about font technology, multilingual typography and web design in English, German and Polish. I am a member of Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI), an international typographic organization, where I serve at the Board and as country delegate for Poland. I am also a member of GUST (the Polish TeX Users’ Group), and visiting lecturer at the academic typography course AKT held at the Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw.

At the age of three, I learned how to read and write. At the age of eleven, From this time on, language, typography and software became my passion.

My interest in language and letters reaches as far back as I can remember. Having learned how to read and write at the age of three, in elementary school I was busy analyzing the details of letterforms printed in my schoolbooks. At the age of eleven, I started learning Russian and German, and made my first bitmap fonts for my 8-bit Atari computer. With thirteen, I visited the great Polish typographer Stefan Szczypka in his Warsaw studio. He showed my his type specimens, his typographic creations, and the fonts that he had worked on. I was extremely lucky to meet him — he is one of the very few designers in Poland to whom typography is important, if not essential. He was my first teacher of typography, even though not in any formal manner. Ever since, we’ve been regularly meeting and exchanging ideas.

With fifteen, I modified the PostScript printer driver of Windows 3.0 to make it print Polish texts. By the age of nineteen (in 1994) I had written my own bitmap font editor for MS DOS. I wanted to make and modify PostScript and TrueType fonts, so I tried several available font editors. I was unhappy with what I found until I discovered FontLab 3.0 in 1997.

To fund my University studies in Frankfurt (Oder), in 1995 I started working as student assistant at Professor Karl Kurbel’s department of business computing. This work gave me solid training in electronic document publishing, database design and software development, but it also gave me early and high-speed access to the Internet. I was amazed to discover TYPO-L, an e-mail discussion list dedicated to typography, which allowed me to make my first contacts with international typographers and type designers. In 1996, a group of designers from Potsdam visited my University to present ideas for a new logo. One of them invited me to participate in my first typographic conference ever: the German-language Forum Typografie in Potsdam. With a typographic friend Martin Schumacher, I designed and produced Viadro, a student magazine at my University. In 1997, Martin and I visited TypoMedia in Frankfurt/Main, organized by Linotype. There, I met the great Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger — something that I had never dreamt of just a few years earlier.

In 1998, I attended the ATypI conference in Lyon, where I met many type designers, including John Hudson and Ross Mills of Tiro Typeworks — who gave me my first typographic job ever: to analyze and improve the design of the Polish diacritics in their fonts. In subsequent years, I got more and more involved in font technology and multilingual typography. I sent more than 800 e-mails to Yuri Yarmola, Vice President and principal developer of Fontlab Ltd, reporting bugs and making improvement suggestions. Many of them were incorporated into Fontlab products. I created some guidelines for Polish diacritic characters design. In 1998, I also designed the central website of my University — a creation that has proved some amazing persistence by remaining online, virtually unchanged, for eight years, until finally being replaced in 2006. Also in 1998, Martin Schumacher invited me to do some freelance design work as type director for his Frankfurt (Oder)-based design bureau ffo agentur, where I designed and art-directed “1200”, a monthly magazine. I also developed some websites and customized some fonts for internal use.

In 2000, I joined the team of MyFonts, a new and dynamically expanding font online distributor, as typographic consultant. I became the Polish country delegate at ATypI. I also voluntarily took over the role of assistant manager of the Fontlab forum at MSN, where I have been providing support to other users ever since. In 2001, I was one of the first beta testers of FontLab 4.0, which — among other features — allowed users to automate repetitive tasks using Python scripting. I spent five months in Vancouver, working for Tiro Typeworks, where I developed a set of Python scripts that facilitated a huge 3000-font conversion project. Later, I developed custom Python scripting solutions for Linotype and other customers.

For all these years, I remained a part-time student. I never managed to give up one for the other. With all the fascinating challenges and typographic projects I have been given the ability to participate in, I was never able, or maybe rather willing to take a radical time off and finish my graduation quickly. It’s been proceeding slowly, but it is proceeding. In 2005, I started teaching as visiting lecturer at the academic typography course AKT held at the Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw.

When I’m not working, studying or traveling, I enjoy reading Shakespeare and watching Fawlty Towers.

— Adam Twardoch, in August 2006

In the About section, you will find detailed information about my education and professional experience; you will also be able to read or download some of my publications. Refer to the Contact section for my postal address, e-mail address and telephone numbers.