Requisite Sparky Bio Page

I'm Sparky, generally known as Dan Rhatigan, and I run this joint. There's plenty to be discovered about me if you just look around, but here are a few assorted details to enhance your understanding of who I may or may not be:

• I am a type designer/graphic designer living in London, England.
• I am a senior typeface designer with Monotype Imaging, based out of their UK office. I first got involved with the company while working on a joint project between Monotype and the University of Reading , researching and designing non-Latin typefaces, primarily those used in India. It was a very, very cool job, and now that I design type full-time it's even cooler. [Standard disclaimer: this whole site is about my views, not theirs. Leave them out of this.]
• I also teach part-time in the Master of Choreography program at ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in the Netherlands. I'm not a dancer or choreographer, though: I teach a unit on arts branding, or "using common sense to make people remember who you are and what you do."
• You can look at some of my design work and history here.
• I was born in 1970 in scenic Staten Island, the unglamorous, semi-suburbany part of New York City. I grew up the youngest of six kids, and I have 25 first cousins. Can you tell we're Irish Catholic?
• I lived in New York City for most of my life, but I've never actually lived in Manhattan, just gone to high school and then much later worked there. I spent pretty much all my adult life in Boston and Brooklyn, with a couple of years in Queens thrown in for good measure. At the moment, I live in the United Kingdom, and I'm trying awfully hard to stay over here.
• I moved to the U.K. to do the MA Typeface Design program at the University of Reading, which was one of the better decisions I've made in my life. I loved the hell out of it, and finally figured out what I should have been doing with myself all these years.
• My past academic escapades have included 12 years of Catholic school, a BFA magna cum laude in graphic design from B.U. (and I'll be the first to admit that I used the demands of an art program as an excuse to shirk more serious academic interests I might have pursued in another life), two cracks at a master's degree in design (a year at B.U. and a year at Pratt Institute, neither of which challenged me the way I'd hoped), and a couple of years teaching design and typography courses at the City College of New York.
• At some point during my late twenties, I was infected with HIV. I don't exactly know how, but it goes without saying that I regret all the times that I thought I was acting safely enough, but wasn't quite. It's a stinky burden to carry around. I'm very lucky, though, that I am in excellent health and I have the resources at my disposal to stay that way. So far I'm also loving the hell out of socialized medicine here in the U.K.
• If you're just here cruising, or being a voyeuristic lurker, then you may as well just cut to the chase and tell me. I can probably use the ego boost.
• And I'm a big ol' 'mo, in case you're wondering how to tailor those flirtatious remarks.
• The stuff on this web site is just a glimpse. There's more to me than you'll ever see revealed here. Never forget that.