With her background in languages and her PhD in Indian Palaeography (SOAS), Fiona Ross began working at Linotype in the United Kingdom in 1978. She became Linotype’s first female manager when she assumed leadership of the non-Latin typographic department with responsibility for the design of their non-Latin fonts and typesetting schemes. Under her leadership, Linotype created designs that are some of the most widely used in the world.

Since 1989, Ross has worked as a consultant, author, lecturer, and type designer. Her book, The Printed Bengali Character and Its Evolution, is one of the primary resources on typography for a language spoken by over 250 million people throughout the world.

In 2003, Ross joined the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading (UK), where she is Associate Professor in Non-Latin Type Design and Curator of the Department’s Non-Latin Type Collection. At the university, she lectures on non-Latin typeface design and advises students in the postgraduate typography and graphic communication program.

Her most recent work as a designer has been as Associate Designer at Tiro Typeworks , where she collaborates with Tim Holloway and John Hudson on typefaces for clients such as Ananda Bazar Patrika, Adobe, Microsoft and Harvard University Press.

Read her 2017 interview with Adobe Typekit here.

Watch the presentation of her 2018 TDC Medal and remarks in New York City here.

View her keynote address at TDC’s Type Drives Culture conference in March 2019, in which she discusses why it is critical to afford visible voices to global linguistic communities, here.