Jim Rimmer, famed Canadian typographer and designer, passed away last Friday after a battle with cancer. He was 76.
Rimmer founded Vancouver-based Pie Tree Press after retiring from a career as a linetype operator at the North Shore Citizen.
“I didn’t quit just because I was 65. It was just good timing. I was living as an illustrator and letterer and that kind of work just completely disappeared,” Rimmer told PrintAction in a story about him in September 2003. “The trade was beginning to evaporate. So I left letterpress as a trade but continued to practice it as a craft.”
At Pie Tree Press and Rimmer Type Foundry in his home city of New Westminster, BC, Rimmer was able to express his talents in letterpress and design at a time when the craft hit a resurgence in the art community. Despite an initial mistrust of computer technologies, late in his career he embraced it and started designing typography digitally.
Rimmer was responsible for the typeface Stern, the first font to be created in metal and digital formats at the same time. In his career as a type designer, he has created over 200 typefaces. In 2006, Rimmer wrote an autobiography Leaves from the Pie Tree, which features all of this fonts as well as his design philosophy.
Read the September 2003 story on Rimmer and letterpress printing.
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