Dan Rhatigan (born 1970) is an American typeface designer and typographer that has worked as type director or senior manager for several digital type companies including Adobe Fonts, Monotype, The Type Founders, and Type Network. [1] Rhatigan is the owner and designer for his own type foundry, Bijou Type.
Rhatigan's interest and obsession with Letraset dry transfer lettering has turned into amassing one of the largest collections of dry transfer sheets in the world, hosted as a Wiki called LetraSlut. Since 2009, Rhatigan has been the publisher of Pink Mince a zine devoted to queer culture and typography. Inside of the type and design community, Rhatigan is well-known for his typographic tattoos which cover much of his arms and legs. [2] [3]
Originally from Staten Island, New York; Rhatigan now resides in Portland, Oregon.
Rhatigan studied type design at the University of Reading and received his MA in Typeface Design in 2007. [4] His typeface designed during his studies was called Gina. His dissertation was entitled Three typefaces for mathematics and was completed in September, 2007. [4]
After graduating, Rhatigan stayed in the United Kingdom, working as an embedded researcher at Monotype with famed type designer Robin Nicolas (best-known for designing Arial). He spent time in the design archives at Monotype's Salfords former manufacturing offices and possesses a great deal of historical knowledge about Monotype in the United Kingdom.
From 2011 to 2015, Rhatigan lived in London and worked at Monotype in the United Kingdom as type director. He led design on custom typefaces for CNN, Salesforce, Southwest Sans, Paypal, Beats by Dre, Opel, The Times, and many others.
He left Monotype and joined Adobe Fonts as senior manager of font development and worked at Adobe from 2016 to 2021. After leaving Adobe in 2021, he started he own type foundry, Bijou Type. From 2021 to 2023, Rhatigan worked as director of type products at Type Network. During 2023–2024, Rhatigan was Director of Foundry Relations at The Type Founders.
In 2024, Rhatigan returned back to Monotype as director of inventory Management and then transitioned to senior creative foundry director. [1]
Rhatigan was featured in the 2017 film, Graphic Means [5] by Briar Levit where he shared his expertise about the democratization of design for queer and marginalized groups that was opened up by access to dry transfer lettering for publications.
During his time working for Monotype, Rhatigan helped curate several public design exhibitions based on his knowledge of Monotype's archival material related to typography and printing.