Simon used to be, well, he used to be a lot of things. He was the editor of Personal Computer World, the biggest computer magazine in the country and that’s where he learned about print, publishing and the joys of typography. While he was there he founded What Mobile magazine as a hobby. That’s another thing he used to be, the editor and publisher of What Mobile. The magazine shared offices with a Repro company in Clerkenwell. It’s said that if you cut someone in Clerkenwell back then they bled printers ink. It was the centre of the print trade. Fleet Street was a short walk and the London College of Printing not far. It was in this old-tech environment that Simon learnt about business and mobile phones. Indeed he learnt so much about mobile phones in ten years of running What Mobile that he was poached by Motorola to work on future projects, one of those was a skunkworks which built a new user interface: a programmer is something else Simon used to be. The combination of journalist, general mobile phone bod and UI person means type has always lurked around the things Simon has done. His favourite font is New Johnston, which is odd because he dislikes most things to do with London Underground.

Simon has been asked by Monotype Imaging to contribute to the blog.