In 1994, Crossgrove earned a degree in printing with a concentration in typography from RIT. He moved to San Francisco and worked in print production for a number of years while freelancing on several type design projects for Monotype, before joining the company in 2001.

Crossgrove has designed a variety of typefaces ranging from the Reliq®, Origami™ and Beorcana™ designs to the warm, clean lines of the Mundo Sans™ type family. His work for Monotype Imaging often takes him into the realm of non-Latin scripts and type production. One recent challenge was reviving the Noori Nastaliq™ type family, a connecting calligraphic Arabic script originally developed for use on Monotype imagesetters in the 1970s. “Nastaliq is a revered historic style of calligraphy which is characterized by sloping word alignments,” Crossgrove says. Previous incarnations of desktop technology did not allow for implementation of the script until OpenType® technology made it possible to create fonts to set exotic and complicated languages. Crossgrove analyzed the original calligraphy to find a common joining scheme that would work technically while providing fluid, realistic written joins.

“OpenType allowed us to consider ways to represent the style with an economical character set and intelligent programming,” Crossgrove says. “Amazing things are possible with OpenType, but not a lot of designers know this. Programmers and designers need to discuss the possibilities. This is the time for designers to dream big and wild.”