At 6'3", he's too big for an elf!It's been quite an experience! With a B.F.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1971, he has spent his career building a reputation as a graphic designer, font designer, typographer, author, and teacher. While that was taking place, he married the Rev. Patricia Bergsland (which was the best thing that ever happened to him outside of meeting Jesus).
After over 20 years as a graphic designer and art director, David was hired to revamp the Commercial Printing degree at Albuquerque Technical Vocational Institute in 1991. The motivation to make such a radical career change was the opportunity to integrate desktop publishing with traditional offset printing.
The digital workflow was such an obvious advantage that by early 1993 he was doing everything digitally except plating and presswork. As a teacher, in 1996 he moved to the Business department with his digital press and wrote the curriculum and all the course materials of the Business Graphics & Communication degree for Albuquerque Technical Vocational Institute. This was one of the first degrees in the country to combine print, web, and multimedia training into a single 2-year degree training students to survive in the newly dominant paradigm of digital publishing. Only a small remnant remains.
In 1994, Delmar Publishing asked him to share the training materials he developed in his first book, "Printing in Digital World". He did so producing all the writing, graphic, fonts, and layout for the book. He was responsible for sending the final files to the publisher's printer.
This started a radical change in his career. He has worked since then as an author, book designer, and font designer. He became involved with software development teams at Adobe and Macromedia to get info on the latest releases for his books. He wrote five more books for Delmar/Thomson and another for McGraw-Hill on digital publishing using what is now known as the Creative Suite, +FreeHand. Five are still available. He did all the book design and prepress production for the Thomson books, but McGraw Hill would not allow that. So they took a book on InDesign CS and typography, and laid it out and set it with Ventura. The resulting typography in the book was abysmal. The book did very poorly.
Recently he started his own publishing house, Radiqx Press. This is where he offers his writings now. They are all on-demand so the publishing costs are contained. Several of his printed booklets are selling a little — and download versions are selling better.
In his first book, "Printing in Digital World", David's love of typography showed in the production of the layout and digital files for the book. But he was continually frustrated by fonts with no true small caps, no lowercase figures, no figures to use for fractions, no swashes, no ligatures…
So he designed almost all of the fonts for the book . Most were very derivative, but they worked. He continued playing with fonts after the book was complete. He used only his fonts for the Digital Drawing book on FreeHand that followed.
He thought he was merely designing fonts as a relaxing hobby. But a company called Makambo contacted him (actually it was an earlier iteration with a different name) and asked if they could sell the fonts for a small cut. Of Course!
At the time he was designing all of his fonts with Fontographer, which was developed by the same people who later came out with what became FreeHand.
Around the time of the new millennium, Bitstream took over Makambo adding it to their site Which has since become huge.MyFontsThe fonts started selling quite well. David started to design fonts for sale rather than for self entertainment. They became almost work — but still fun.
After OpenType came out it became obvious that this was the way to go. Fontographer had not been updated since 1996 (or something like that). So NuevoDeco turned to FontLab — a Russian software company?
NuevoDeco puts out a dozen or more fonts a year — all 600+ character OpenType fonts. Myfonts is doing a great job of marketing. And they are selling well (relatively speaking). Brinar made #1 for all of MyFonts for a couple months early in 2007.