Tobias Frere-Jones

Many of Frere-Jones' typefaces are extremely large families designed for professional users, for instance Mallory which as of 2019 had 110 styles. Organisations that commissioned work from Frere-Jones have included GQ magazine, the Whitney Museum, the Wall Street Journal, Martha Stewart Living and the Essex Market. In 2014 German type designer Erik Spiekermann, who published Frere-Jones' first typeface, described him as "one of the two or three best type designers in the world".

Among his typefaces are Gotham which was used by the Obama 2008 presidential campaign, and Archer which has been used by Martha Stewart Living and Wells Fargo.

In 2006, Frere-Jones received the Gerrit Noordzij Prize, an award given by The Royal Academy of Art (The Hague) to honor innovations in type design. In 2013 he received the AIGA Medal and won the National Design Award for Communication Design from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in 2019.

Frere-Jones married Dr. Christine Annabelle Bateup in 2006.

In 1999, he left Font Bureau to return to New York, where he began working with the company of Jonathan Hoefler, renamed Hoefler & Frere-Jones in 2005. While working together, the two collaborated on projects for The Wall Street Journal, Martha Stewart Living, Nike, Pentagram, GQ, Esquire magazine, The New Times, Business 2.0, and The New York Times Magazine. In 2014 Frere-Jones ended his work with Hoefler and filed a lawsuit against him which was resolved in an out-of-court settlement later that year. He then established his own company, Frere-Jones Type, which released its first retail family, Mallory, in 2015.

After receiving a BFA in 1992 from Rhode Island School of Design, Frere-Jones joined Font Bureau in Boston, becoming Senior Designer. He created a number of the typefaces that are Font Bureau's best known, among them Interstate. He joined the Yale School of Art faculty in 1996, and teaches type design there alongside Matthew Carter and Nina Stössinger.

Several of Frere-Jones' designs in the 1990s, notably Reactor, were highly expressive in the "grunge typography" style of the period; some were created for Neville Brody. However, he commented in a 1994 article that "grunge has firmly dated itself and many are already tired of it." A 2012 review by Christopher Hamamoto described Frere-Jones' later work as generally based on "formality and practicality", and a Businessweek article commented that Frere-Jones' later type design generally preferred "a cleaner style based on historic typefaces". Frere-Jones' popular font family Gotham was based on lettering on New York public buildings, and his later sans-serif family Mallory was intended to be conceptually "autobiographical", referring to his British family and intended to amalgamate characteristics of British and American typography.

Tobias Frere-Jones (born Tobias Edgar Mallory Jones; August 28, 1970) is an American type designer who works in New York City. He operates the company Frere-Jones Type and teaches typeface design at the Yale School of Art MFA program.