Mike Daines studied typographic design at the London School of Printing in the 1960s and began his career as a type designer in the London studios of Letraset, where he designed a number of typefaces, notably Hawthorn and University Roman. He worked in display photosetting at Alphabet and TypeShop, then, as a director of Letraset’s Typographic Systems Division, he managed URW, Hamburg, involved in the installation of the Ikarus type digitization systems for Monotype, Compugraphic, Berthold and Linotype. Mike later founded Baseline magazine, Applied Graphics Limited, co-founded Applied Arabic, an Arabic type design licensing company, and The Foundry (with David Quay and Freda Sack), an early digital typefoundry. In 2003 he established eLexicons Limited, to develop interactive learning resources, where he edited and published the eLexicon of Typography.