I have been designing electronic type under my own company Match Software since 1987. At the time, it was bitmapped fonts for printers essentially, and I also designed utilities to download these fonts.
Now I design only vector fonts, using current technology.
I come from a family of painters and photographers. My grandfather was an engraver and a painter. I learned copperplate calligraphy in grade school, in France, during the 50s, when it was still mandatory.
I have always been fascinated by books, and had the chance to be exposed to a large family library of beautiful books.
I do hope that ebooks and screen reading will not damage too much the art of fine printing. Sure, we live in an electronic world, and I am an early netizen (Compuserve member since 1982), but paper has its own charm. It conveys to other senses : the sense of touch, with texture, feeling of flexibility of the paper, smoothness or not of the cover. The sense of earing. Flipping pages does not produce the same feeeling wether the book is a paperback or a luxury edition. Sense of smell ; old books and their musky, somewhat dusty scent will never be rendered by ebooks. How could one sneeze over a screen ? Altogether, the most important thing is to remain conscious that the non-verbal message conveyed by text typography, and printed matter is just a relevant as the arrangement of the words used by the author.