fter two months of intensive contact, I can hardly remember what life was like in the time before I knew Adam Twardoch.

The FontLab programmes all encourage you make contact and give feedback, they say it so often that it really sounds like they mean it ... I aways have a head chock-full of reactions, comment, questions whenever I learn a new programme, for me it's an essential part of the learning experience, so I thought I'd try writing.

The first few times it was Adam who replied, with real reactions, he must have spend ages writing, he did wonders not only in helping me understand some of the mysteries of the FontLab programmes but also bringing me into the larger type world, even encouraging me to distribute my own fonts in a wider context. After that I had contact with Sasha and Oleg in St. Petersburg and finally chief engineer Yuri himself, as well as Ted and Jimmie in America - they really do communicate, and have given me to understand that they value the feedback I can give them :-)

Adam doesn't only work for FontLab, he seems to be a consultant for just about every serious player in the type field, as well as the international typography association ATypI. I associate him with an extraordinary combination of deep knowledge and remarkable humility, a lovely speaking voice (hear him on TypeRadio), a lovely singing voice (I got to hear his first expereince of multi-tracking, which he'd done in Apple's Garage Band - my reaction was simply 'Look out Bobby McFerrin!').

Perhaps of greatest value to Everyman, though, is his super-generous web-site full of goodies to download, including PDFs of stunning slide-shows from various conference presentations. One example of many is That annoying noise around letters: Latin diacritic character design, produced with Victor Gaultney, a journey through the fascinating world of accented letters, making meaningful the distinctions between things which for the man in the street are the same, if he even notices them at all, like the Spanish cedilla and the Polish ogonek.

Adam gives us that perfect balance of an aesthetic experience coupled with pertinent information and copious food for thought.