When Thomas Rickner decided he wanted to be a type designer after a lecture on the history of Baskerville at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the mid-1980s, his typography professor had some simple advice: Don’t do it.

“He told me it was a road to frustration,” recalls Rickner, who nearly three decades later is a font production manager at Monotype. “At the time, there was just no easy path to being a type designer. You couldn’t go to school for it, and there were only a handful of companies around the world that would teach you. He told me to become a book designer. That, he said, I could do anywhere.”

“He told me to become a book designer. That, he said, I could do anywhere.”

Clearly, Rickner ignored his professor’s advice. And it was a good thing he did. Over the next two decades, thanks to the advent of personal computers, type design–and, consequently, the ability to become a type designer–exploded. Now, not only do dozens of universities offer type design degrees, but it’s possible to freelance as a type designer, selling your fonts online, without ever being hired by a major foundry.

What changed? There are dozens of reasons why the last 30 years have seen a renaissance in type design. But when you talk to Rickner, you get the sense that one company played an outsized role in democratizing type during those years: Apple. And he had a part in it.

Rickner’s first type design job was at Imagen, a laser printer manufacturer, where he started in 1988. At the time, laser printers didn’t just print any font your computer had installed; instead, printers all had their own built-in fonts, custom designed for each individual model. Rickner’s job was to “hint” these typefaces, or write little programs that optimized the way characters were displayed at different font sizes on Imagen’s laser printers.

His experience with hinting led Rickner to a job at Apple, where he became lead typographer in 1989. It was an important time to be a type designer at Apple, because the Mac maker was about to do as much to revolutionize computer typography as it had done to revolutionize desktop publishing. Apple was aiming–in secret–to build a way to render third-party fonts right into the Mac operating system itself, radically changing the way computers dealt with text.

Let’s back up a second. When Apple first released the Macintosh in 1984, one of the many ways in which it was revolutionary was in allowing users to choose between fonts. These fonts were extremely limited, though. Until 1991, the Macintosh only supported bitmap fonts–or fonts made up of individual images, one per character. When you made a bitmap font larger or smaller, it became harder to read, either because it had become pixellated at large sizes, or because the operating system just shrank all the pixels down without doing any optical correction to make sure the letters were still legible. The Mac only natively supported a small number of low-res proprietary fonts. These were just good enough for someone printing out their grandma’s cookie recipes, or writing a family newsletter, but not for more serious type–let alone professional–aspirations.