The Advent of Digital Typography

Abstract

Presents an interview conducted with Liz Bond Crews. Crews began her career as a systems analyst in Los Angeles, CA, USA, for RCA. She soon joined the Xerox Electro-Optical Division in Pasadena, CA, where she led a group building special systems for National Geographic magazine, Ginn & Company, and University Microfilm. In her final position at Xerox, she licensed high-quality typeface designs from Mergenthaler Linotype, among others, for use on Xerox’s high-performance 9700 laser printer. In the early 1980s, the Adobe cofounder John Warnock recruited Crews to Adobe Systems, where her first task was to license high-quality typeface designs to be rendered as Adobe Type 1 fonts for PostScript printers. While at Adobe, she was responsible for bringing high-quality typography to the Adobe PostScript pagedescription language, running corporate marketing, hiring graphics designers, and putting Adobe on a firm footing with professional designers and printers, greatly enhancing the value of their product. After Adobe, she helped found Electronics for Imaging and, after some consulting, retired in 1993.