Robin Nicholas has spent his entire career working with letters. What’s more, he’s stayed with one company the whole time – he’s been with Monotype in the UK for more than 40 years.

Born in Westerham, Kent, England, in 1947, Nicholas joined the Monotype Type Drawing Office in 1965. The teenager had served an earlier apprenticeship as a draftsman. That training in precision drawing, coupled with his natural artistic abilities, made him a perfect candidate to work in the field of type design.

After his initial training at Monotype, Nicholas redrew master artwork for typefaces licensed for the company’s phototypesetting systems. He spent another two years training in punch cutting and the preparation of metal fonts for design proofing. Over time, Nicholas became manager of the Type Drawing Office, a position he held for 10 years. He currently serves as the head of typography at Monotype in the UK.

In the late 1970s, Nicholas designed the transitional serif Nimrod® design. This family of typefaces was crafted specifically for newspaper text, headlines and small ads. The Nimrod design was seen in many newspapers worldwide, including 10 years in the pages of The Guardian in London.

In 1982, Nicholas drew a contemporary sans serif typeface for low-resolution output devices – this design would eventually evolve into the Arial® typeface family. He worked with Monotype’s Patricia Saunders to shape the Arial design into a full family. Microsoft later selected the Arial design as a core font for the Windows® 3.1 operating system. Nicholas and his Monotype colleagues have further expanded the Arial family over the years. As one of the standard fonts in the Windows operating system, the Arial design is one of the most used typeface families in the world.