He tries to make fonts that he would want to use himself, if only they existed. That fonts are tools for making things, not ends in themselves.
![proxima nova font in css proxima nova font in css](https://forums.tumult.com/uploads/db2156/original/3X/9/7/971d38e6e07dcc9211fd94564ee2a229b41d2823.png)
Mark likes to think that the years he spent as a designer using fonts give him an appreciation for what designers look for in a font.
![proxima nova font in css proxima nova font in css](https://cdn.bfldr.com/V5QKTUK8/at/6zhn3m68cqx9w72c95gcwr7z/proxima-nova.png)
He occasionally writes about type ( The Scourge of Arial and Typecasting: The Use (and Misuse) of Type in Movies, both on his website) and has spoken at TypeCon and other events frequented by type nerds. He is probably best known as the creator of Proxima Nova. It only took about thirty years, but he finally has his dream job. Mark Simonson is an independent type designer based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. To date, he has released 24 original typeface families comprising almost 200 fonts. By 2005, well into his forties, he was finally making fonts full-time. Things started getting serious when he quit his day job and opened Mark Simonson Studio in 2000, working in earnest to create and release new fonts. In the mid-nineties, Mark released his first few digital fonts to very modest success. A breakthrough occourred in 1986 when he got hold of Fontographer 1.0, a program that allowed one to create real fonts on a Macintosh personal computer.
![proxima nova font in css proxima nova font in css](https://i1.wp.com/www.downloadfonts.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/11-Metropolis-bold-font.png)
His early attempts were feeble, but he kept practicing and learning about type over the next couple decades in his spare time while doing magazine art direction, graphic design, and the occasional illustration or lettering job. It was a daydream that began when, while at college in the mid-seventies, he became aware that designing typefaces was a thing one could do.