I was born in Oakland, California in 1941 and raised in the nearby community of Richmond. One of our Richmond neighbors was a lettering artist. His name was Abraham Lincoln Paulsen. When I was seven years old I would spend hours watching him work in his studio. That was the beginning of my life-long love of lettering. I studied advertising design and painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. I graduated in 1963. In 1964 I moved to Kansas City, Missouri where I worked as a lettering artist for Hallmark Cards. Hermann Zapf was consulting at Hallmark, and I had the rare opportunity to listen and learn from him. The person who taught me more about lettering and type design than anyone else was Myron McVay, my supervisor at Hallmark, a superb lettering artist, now retired. Acid rock and the Summer of Love lured me back to California. As a free-lance lettering artist in Oakland, I did everything from sign painting to lettering for advertising and packaging to make ends meet. I embraced the hippy life-style. Eventually I found myself doing work for rock bands. I did lettering for Creedence Clearwater, Taj Mahal, The Doobie Brothers, Kansas, and a host of others. In the mid-1970s, I was doing lettering for Rolling Stone magazine, then headquartered in San Francisco. I met Roger Black shortly after he became the Art Director at Rolling Stone. Dan Solo, an Oakland typographer, introduced us. Roger hired me to design a series of Rolling Stone typefaces and, also, to redesign the magazine’s logo. I found that working for a publication, designing a custom typeface or a logo, was much more fulfilling than all the other lettering work I’d been doing and, after that, I tried to make it a point to work for publications as much as possible. In 1990 I put away my pen and ink and went totally digital. I honed my computer skills working part-time at the San Francisco Chronicle, designing fonts. I was also one of the designers of ITC Bodoni. I’ve had the good fortune to work with some great designers, font companies and publications. The work on this web site represents what I do. Jim Parkinson, 2003.