Cyrus Highsmith is a typeface designer, illustrator, and author.

After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997, he worked at Font Bureau in Boston as Senior Type Designer until founding his own type foundry, Occupant Fonts.

Some of Highsmith’s most well-known typefaces are Zócalo, used by the Mexican daily El Universal, and the Antenna series, which was used in several magazine designs as well as by Ford and the official Star Wars website. Other clients for custom fonts include or have included The Wall Street Journal, Martha Stewart Living, La Prensa Gráfica of El Salvador, ESPN, and Men’s Health.

His typefaces Prensa and Relay won the 2001 Bukvaːraz! award, organized by ATypI (the International Typographic Association) in 2001. In 2015, Cyrus Highsmith received the Gerrit Noordzij Prize by the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.

In addition to typeface design, Highsmith has been teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, since 2000, while also lecturing and taking part in juries in North America, Japan and across Europe.

With his own imprint, Occupant Press, he publishes children’s books and other prints. In 2016, Highsmith founded Occupant Fonts in Providence, Rhode Island, which continues to publish his typefaces designed while at Font Bureau as well as new releases.

In September 2017, it was announced that Occupant Fonts had been acquired by the Japanese type foundry Morisawa and thenceforth functioned as their Providence drawing office, with Highsmith as its creative director.