Started by James Montalbano in 1990, Terminal Design, Inc. is located on the terminal moraine in Brooklyn, NY.

The firm specializes in typeface design, font development and digital lettering. It has designed custom fonts and lettering for editorial, corporate, government, and publishing clients including: Vanity Fair, Vogue, Mens Vogue, Glamour, Brides, Fortune and Money magazines; Little Brown & Co. Inc., Scribner, JC Penney, Miller Brewing, AT&T, The American Medical Association and The U.S National Park Service.

Over the last fourteen years Montalbano has been working on the Clearview type system for text, display, roadway and interior guide signage. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Print, Creative Review, ID and Wired. He is a past president of the Type Directors Club (TDC), and has taught typography and type design at Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design. He currently teaches type design at School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York CIty.

Montalbano’s professional career began as a public school graphic arts teacher,
trying to get his young students interested in letterpress, offset and silk screen printing. When told he would also have to teach wood shop, he quit and went to graduate school. After receiving an M.Ed in Technology Education, he studied lettering with Ed Benguiat, began drawing type and working in the wild world of New York City type shops and magazine art departments. His career continued as a magazine art director, moving on to become a design director responsible for 20 trade magazines whose subject matter no one should be required to remember. He was talked into designing pharmaceutical packaging, but that only made him ill. When his nausea subsided, he started Terminal Design, Inc. and hasn’t been sick since.