Services
Services
Phinney can get you what you need efficiently and accurately, whether it is a quick take to determine whether more investigation is worthwhile, a report, a sworn affidavit, or expert testimony in the courtroom.
Font ID & Availability
How do you prove what font was used in a document? How can you tell whether a given font was available on the purported date the document was created? What if the only version of the document available is a degraded fax? These are the kinds of questions Phinney can answer—and in some cases get certain font ID even from very poor copies. Learn why Microsoft’s lawyers, PR and fonts teams routinely refer inquiries to Phinney.
How available was Calibri at a particular date prior to its official release in 2007? Phinney is the premier expert on the availability of different Calibri versions during its development. and the intricacies of the Calibri timeline, including changes in its default numeral styling. (Not to mention Cambria and the other typefaces developed at the same time.)
Aptos only shipped in 2023 and became the new Microsoft default font in 2024. But it was publicly available for several years prior, under a different name… but with one subtle difference.
Legibility & Point Size
Sometimes text has a specific legally required minimum size. Sometimes there is no specific legal minimum, but courts may still expect the text to be legible… and one expects any discussion of the legibility of the text to include point size.
Did you know that there is nothing in printed material that you can measure in isolation that tells you the point size of a font? A capital “H” in two different fonts, measuring the exact same physical size, can be a different actual point size, commonly varying by 10%, 20% or sometimes more. (Apple once changed a system font to be two and a half times as large at the “same” point size.) Phinney can explain how and why, both to you and the court. He can also identify the font if it is unknown (a critical step), and then proceed to determine the actual point size with precision. A quick primer on point size.
Phinney is also familiar with other literature on legibility, including questions of ideal line length, font selection, line spacing, and more.
Other Services
The above are just the two most common kinds of “font detective” tasks Phinney routinely handles. But he is an all-around font expert, with extensive background in the design, technology, history, and business of fonts. He is a type designer*, writer, teacher and historian of fonts, equally at home reviewing font quality, digging through the boxes of a century-old library archive, or sorting through saved pre-release operating systems to ascertain when a given font version was available.
In the event Phinney happens to not be the right person for something, or has insufficient availability for your schedule needs, he will gladly give you a referral.
* Why yes, this website is set in one of his typefaces, Hypatia Sans.