John Collins

I live in Boston. I am married to Nichola Collins. Until I took late retirement in January 2018, I worked for MyFonts, a web site that helps font designers sell their fonts to a large and varied number of customers. Over the years, I have been thrilled to hear from font designers who have been able to quit their day jobs and make a good, sometimes great, living doing what they love: designing fonts.

Although I started as an electrical engineer, I was seduced by computers soon after graduating. Hard to believe now, but that was a time when London University considered one computer to be sufficient to handle the computing needs of all of the colleges within the entire university. I count myself fortunate to have a career that coincided with the computer revolution.

Much of my working life has been spent in various aspects of the typographic world; a relatively small community of amazingly talented people who use both halves of their brain to solve technical and artistic problems.

Some of my current interests are:

• Bicycling along the Charles and the Minuteman bicycle paths.
• Just about anything connected with preparing and enjoying food.
• Listening to Wagner, Bach, Mahler, jazz and some oldies.
• I also like learning about the history of industrial and transportation development, by visiting industrial archeology sites, bridges, canals, locks, and mills. Lowell, MA, has lots of good stuff; but my favorite sites of this kind are the hydraulic lift locks at Peterborough and Kirkfield, Ontario, and Foxton Locks in Leicestershire, England, with a staircase of 10 locks and an abandoned inclined plane.