Thomas Jockin is a type designer, educator, writer, and founder of TypeThursday.
Thomas Jockin is a type designer, educator, writer, and founder of TypeThursday.
Variable Font Technology
This is technology in its most direct form: built around how people actually read, not how a grid wants them to. Lexend — the reading-fluency typeface Thomas co-created with Dr. Bonnie Shaver-Troup — has been downloaded more than 500,000 times through Google Fonts and rendered on over 2 billion webviews. Readex is its open-source, world-script expansion.
She was effectively frozen trying to read the first version and skipped over entire words just to keep going. Then read the Lexend in an almost effortless fashion. It was stunning.
— David, a parent, testing an 80-word passage with his daughter in Times New Roman vs. Lexend
Thomas works with organizations on custom type systems, variable fonts, reading-focused typography, and multiscript projects. Past clients include Google, Express, Footlocker, and Michael Kors.
Discuss a type project →A typeface built to fit the reader.
✎ Click to type your own line
Script coverage — today and next
Latin and Arabic are done — try both axes on them above. Each script above gets matched with a type designer who already works in it, not a generalist extending Latin forms by reference.
Thought Leadership
Technology can generate endless options; it still takes a human to decide which one is worth wanting. A blind study of 20 designers found human-made typographic work beat AI-generated work 8 times out of 9 in head-to-head comparison — not because AI can’t produce visually interesting layouts, but because it couldn’t reliably honor the constraints the work actually required. That gap is the same gap Plato and Aristotle pointed to with to kalon: beauty as the thing that makes a claim on you, rather than the thing that’s merely on offer. Making technology serve beauty, instead of replacing the judgment beauty requires, is the argument the book makes in full.
A Philosophy of Glimpses, co-authored with O.G. Rose and Javier Rivera — a fuller treatment of beauty, memory, and phenomenology behind this theme.
Buy on Amazon →Teaching typographic judgment through randomized constraints.
What human judgment contributes when generation becomes cheap.
What Lexend and Readex teach us about designing for readers.
Has taught typography and design at CUNY Queens College, CUNY City College, and SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology. Available for guest lectures, workshops, faculty programming, and design education events — virtual or in person.
Invite Thomas to your classThird Spaces
Most of this work now happens through software, screens, and increasingly AI. TypeThursday is the deliberate counterweight — it started as a handful of people meeting in a Brooklyn bar to critique letterforms, and has since grown into a global, chapter-based community that still meets in person, monthly, city by city, because judgment sharpens in conversation, not in isolation.
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