Today I’ve got some very exciting personal news to share: I’m proud to announce that I’ve joined the Adobe Typekit team as Creative Director.

It’s a thrill and an honour to be stepping into Jason Santa Maria’s shoes and to be working with such a talented bunch of people on a product I genuinely love and use daily. It’s made even more exciting by the new directions the product itself is taking: I believe that the recent MAX announcement about desktop fonts is a real game-changer and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I’ve actually been working with Typekit since January, and over the last few months I’ve been helping the team to solve the design problems posed by the introduction of desktop-syncing (some of which could be seen in Jeff’s MAX demo), as well as some more future-facing stuff that will see the light of day over the next few months. For me, joining the Typekit team is about bringing together two worlds: the web, which has always been my background, and type, my focus in the last couple of years. If anyone’s been wondering why I’ve been checking in a lot in San Francisco lately, this is why!

So, what does this mean for my other projects, like 8 Faces or Viewport Industries? Well, I’m happy to say that they’re not going anywhere: Jason managed to balance his Typekit commitments with his work on A Book Apart and Mighty, and I intend to do the same for my projects. I’ll also continue to work remotely from Bristol, with quarterly-ish trips to the Typekit office. As I mentioned, we’ve been working together with this set-up since January, and it’s been wonderful.

I imagine there will be some sceptical reactions to this news, especially from the anti-Adobe camp, but I honestly feel that Adobe have turned things around in recent years, exemplified by their great Creative Cloud product, their next-generation suite of Edge tools and services, their contributions to new web standards, and of course their acquisition of Typekit. With many acquisitions ending in the death of a product, being part of the Adobe family has actually allowed Typekit to grow and — most importantly — get better. I feel incredibly proud to be in a position where I can contribute to this continued success, and incredibly lucky that I can do so in a way that still allows me creative freedom in other areas of my life.

These are exciting times. Thanks for coming along for the ride.